Googlebot Crawl Activity: Understanding How Google Explores Your Website

Googlebot is Google's automated web crawler — the software that visits your website, reads your pages, and sends the information back to Google's index so your site can appear in search results. If Googlebot cannot access your pages efficiently, it does not matter how good your content is or how well your site is optimised for visitors. Pages that Google cannot crawl do not rank.

The commercial stakes are immediate. Update your pricing, launch a new service page, add a case study — none of it appears in search results until Googlebot crawls and indexes that content. If crawl activity on your site is low or error-prone, there can be a gap of days or weeks between you publishing something and Google seeing it. For a business competing on search visibility, that delay costs enquiries.

This is one of the foundational monitoring tasks covered in website technical health monitoring. Understanding what Googlebot is doing on your site is the starting point for everything else.

What Googlebot Does on Your Site

Googlebot does not browse your website like a customer. It makes a series of structured technical requests, each of which can succeed or fail independently.

Step 1 — DNS resolution. Googlebot looks up your domain name to find your server's IP address. A DNS failure here means Google cannot reach your site at all.

Step 2 — Server connection. Googlebot connects to your hosting server. If the server is down, overloaded, or timing out, the connection fails and no content is retrieved.

Step 3 — HTTP request and response. Googlebot requests the page and your server returns a status code (200, 404, 500, etc.). Only a 200 response means the page content is delivered.

Step 4 — HTML download. Googlebot downloads the raw HTML of the page. This is where the text content, meta tags, and links are read.

Step 5 — Resource discovery and download. Googlebot identifies and downloads CSS and JavaScript files referenced in the HTML. These are needed to render the page — to understand what the page actually looks like and contains.

Step 6 — Rendering. Google's systems combine the HTML and downloaded resources to render the page as a browser would. This is how Google understands page layout, structured data, and content loaded via JavaScript.

Step 7 — Link discovery. Googlebot extracts links from the rendered page to add to the queue of URLs to crawl next.

A problem at any step means Google does not properly process that page. Monitoring crawl activity means checking that each of these steps is completing successfully across your site.

Reading Crawl Stats in Search Console

Google Search Console provides direct visibility into Googlebot's activity on your site. Here is how to access and read the report:

1. Log in to Google Search Console
2. Select your property from the top left
3. Go to Settings (gear icon in the left sidebar)
4. Scroll to Crawl stats and click Open Report

The report shows data for the past 90 days and has three main sections:

Summary section — shows total crawl requests, average response time, and total download size. These headline numbers tell you how active Google is on your site and how efficiently crawling is happening.

By response section — breaks down crawl requests by status code. This is where you see how many requests returned 200 (success), 301 (redirect), 404 (not found), 500 (server error), etc. The percentage of error responses is your crawl fail rate.

By file type section — shows what types of files Googlebot is downloading: HTML pages, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, images, and other resources. If a disproportionate share of crawl activity is on non-HTML files, it may indicate resource waste.

By purpose section — distinguishes between discovery crawls (finding new pages) and refresh crawls (rechecking existing pages). A healthy site shows regular refresh activity across important pages.

Healthy vs Unhealthy Crawl Patterns

Signal	Healthy	Unhealthy	Action Required
Daily crawl volume	Consistent with gradual growth	Erratic — sudden drops then spikes	Investigate server errors if volume drops
Error rate	Below 1%	Above 5%	Immediate investigation
Average response time	Under 500ms	Above 1,500ms	Hosting review and performance investigation
HTML vs redirect ratio	70%+ HTML requests	High proportion of 301 responses	Reduce redirect chains and unnecessary redirects
Discovery vs refresh balance	Regular mix of both	Only refresh, no discovery	Check sitemap and internal linking for orphaned pages
File type distribution	Mostly HTML with appropriate CSS/JS	Disproportionate image or resource crawling	Review resource optimisation

Crawl Budget: When It Matters

For most small business websites — under 1,000 pages — crawl budget is not a practical concern. Google can crawl the entire site comfortably in a single session, and your pages are regularly refreshed.

Crawl budget becomes important when:

• Your site has 10,000 or more URLs
• You have large amounts of low-value URLs being indexed (filter combinations, pagination, URL parameters)
• You are publishing new content frequently and need fast indexing
• You have noticed unusually long delays between publishing and pages appearing in search results

When crawl budget matters, the goal is ensuring Google prioritises your commercial pages over low-value content. Key tactics:

• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of low-value URLs (parameter-generated pages, internal search results). The full guide to robots.txt configuration covers how to do this correctly without accidentally blocking important content.
• Submit an accurate XML sitemap to guide Google toward your priority pages. Understanding XML sitemaps explains how sitemaps influence crawl prioritisation.
• Reduce redirect chains — each redirect in a chain consumes crawl budget. Direct redirects are more efficient.
• Improve server response times — faster responses allow more pages to be crawled per session.

File Types Googlebot Requests

Understanding what files Googlebot downloads explains why blocking certain resources in robots.txt causes problems:

File Type	Why Googlebot Needs It	What Happens If Blocked
HTML	Contains the page content, meta tags, links, and structured data	Page cannot be crawled at all
CSS	Defines the visual layout and structure of the page	Google cannot assess page design; layout signals lost
JavaScript	Often contains content, navigation, and interactive elements	Dynamically loaded content becomes invisible to Google
Images	Provides visual content for image search; helps Google understand page topics	Image search visibility lost; page context may be reduced
Fonts	Generally low-priority for crawling	Minimal ranking impact if blocked

The most damaging block is JavaScript. Many modern websites load significant content via JavaScript — product listings, review scores, pricing, navigation menus. If Googlebot cannot download your JavaScript files, it indexes an empty or incomplete version of your pages.

Where to Monitor Crawl Activity

Everything discussed in this article is visible in Google Search Console. If you are not yet set up with Search Console or are not sure how to navigate it, the complete beginner's guide to Google Search Console covers property verification, report navigation, and the key alerts to configure.

Beyond Search Console, a monthly crawl with Screaming Frog gives you a bottom-up view of crawl issues — seeing your site from the perspective of a crawler, identifying broken links, redirect chains, and blocked resources before Google flags them.

What to Do Right Now

Check your crawl stats today:

1. Open Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Stats
2. Look at the "By response" section — what is your percentage of error responses?
3. Check average response time — is it under 500ms?
4. Look at the 90-day crawl volume graph — is volume consistent, or has it dropped recently?
5. If you see error rates above 1% or response times above 1,000ms, move directly to investigating and fixing those crawl errors

Googlebot crawl health is not a set-and-forget configuration. It is the baseline metric that tells you whether everything else you do — content, links, structure — is actually reaching Google's index. Monitor it weekly and act on changes immediately. That is how you keep your search presence stable and growing.

If you want expert eyes on your crawl data and a clear plan for fixing what you find, our SEO optimisation service includes crawl analysis as part of every technical audit. Get in touch to discuss your site.