Google fixes reduced crawling issue impacting some websites

Google has confirmed it fixed an issue with its crawlers impacting “some sites.” The issue was “reduced / fluctuating crawling” from Google’s end with Googlebot. It is now resolved and Google said the crawling should pick back up in the near future.

What happened. Starting around August 8, 2025, a number of savvy SEOs and site owners started to notice a drop in the crawl rate from Google within Google Search Console. I covered a lot of those reports on the Search Engine Roundtable but here are some:

Google confirmed. This morning, John Mueller from Google confirmed the issue both on Bluesky and on LinkedIn, he wrote:

“This was an issue on our side, and is now resolved. It’ll catch back up automatically in the near future. Sorry for the crawl-blip! It was reduced / fluctuating crawling from our side, for some sites.”

Why we care. If you noticed crawling drops in August, it should resolve itself over the coming days. If it does not resolve, then it might be another issue, unrelated to this Google crawling bug.

That being said, it is unclear how much of an issue this caused in terms of ranking new content and updated content. It is also unclear how many sites were impacted.

You can check your crawl rate in Google Search Console within Settings and then the crawl rate report. Again, many sites, maybe most sites, were not impacted by this.

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About the Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the “US Search Personality Of The Year,” you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O’Clock.Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.


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