Cloudflare, which is used by around 20% of all websites (including this one), is having major outages this morning. Lots of site owners are concerned with how this may impact Google, Bing, and other crawlers. The truth is, these search engines have seen this many times before and it can handle it.
You can check the status of the Cloudflare outage over here but the outage will serve a 5xx server error to Googlebot and other search bots. Those bots will pick up that error and slow down and decide to come back later.
We covered this topic both for individual sites and larger outages numerous times.
If the outage continues on for days, then sure, it might be a bigger issue for Googlebot and other crawlers. But if that happens, and we have a multi-day outage, then we have larger issues.
John Mueller from Google reitered this on Bluesky when I was asked by Ant:
In these widespread outages does Googlebot get into a huff about a site if it's returning a 500 for a long duration - is there material damage to rankings?
I replied:
Google bot has seen this before. It knows to chill for a bit
John Mueller from Google added:
Yeah. 5xx = Google crawling slows down, but it'll ramp back up.If it stays at 5xx for multiple days, then things may start to drop out, but even then, those will pop back in fairly quickly.
So yea, this outage is not fun but (1) Cloudflare is working on it and (2) Google and other search engines have a lot of experience handling it as well and all will be fine in the long run.
Googlebot knows how to deal with site outages, especially large widespread ones - do not worry - Googlebot and other bots will come back and chew up your content www.seroundtable.com/searchintern...
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick.com) November 18, 2025 at 7:31 AM
As a joke, I guess this is one way Cloudflare can block Google's AI efforts.
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
