There are numerous complaints from SEOs and site owners who are noticing significant declines in crawl rates within Google Search Console. Most who see this, many do not by the way, are noticing the decline starts around August 8th and continues through today.
UPDATE: Google's John Mueller confirmed it was an issue on Google's end:
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!
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) August 28, 2025 at 9:25 AM
He added on Bluesky, "It was reduced / fluctuating crawling from our side, for some sites." So not just a reporting issue but an actual crawling issue.
I have been hearing about some of these complaints for a bit but I personally did not notice the declines in any of the many sites I have access to within Google Search Console. So this is not super widespread but there are enough complaints for me to cover it.
While most sites are not impacted, a ton of large sites are. And it goes across several platforms, such as Vercel, WP Engine, Fastly and others. It also seems not to be limited to Google, but also Bing.
Glenn Gabe also posted about this yesterday on X and LinkedIn and wrote:
There are several posts in the Search Central Forum about this, and I just saw the issue pop up for a client. Google's Crawl Stats reporting drops heavily around 8/8. There is no impact to rankings and traffic, but all the sites posting about this see it happen on 8/8. My client is not blocking crawling of Googlebot, and Bing seems totally fine crawling-wise.
Here are links to some of the complaint threads at the Google Webmaster Help forums. Here are also some of those charts from the forums:
But some are from more recently, on August 20,, like this one on X:
And these on X:
These seem to be impacting folks who use specific platforms like Vercel, WP Engine, Fastly but I am not sure if this is a Google issue or a platform issue? I think these platforms were asked about it and said all is good on their end.
In fact, Vercel's CTO, Malte Ubl wrote on X this morning, "There was a major event where the global Googlebot crawl rate dropped by 30%. It manifested in a way where crawling to a relatively small number of large sites dropped to near 0. Behavior was restored on Google's side and crawling is back to baseline https://bots.fyi/d/googlebot."
He shared this chart:
So maybe it was on Google's side?
Here are other platforms that were maybe impacted.
Update, all of them are hosting on WP Engine
— Dhruv Pandya (dp) (@dhruvpandyadp) August 25, 2025
Quick update. Seems like the common thread for this issue is Vercel. I had several people on LinkedIn explain they are seeing this across Vercel clients. My client also uses Vercel. And then one person posted an exchange with Vercel support on my LinkedIn post about this (where… https://t.co/hFct77SaGm
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 27, 2025
Yeah, it was only impacting a small number of large sites overall (But 30% of Googlebot across our network is a lot; we're seeing 200-300 million requests from Googlebot per day)
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) August 28, 2025
Dropped to 0 on August 9th, and came back up yesterday
Ah, interesting. I'll post updates on my shares about this from yesterday. I've had quite a few site owners pinging me about drops after I shared about the crawling drops. And not all were using Vercel, so that makes sense.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 28, 2025
Something indeed happened with the Googlebot in recent weeks - In Cloudflare Radar, the Googlebot HTTP requests from August 17-26 show an important increase: https://t.co/lhxEykp2qb
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) August 28, 2025
cc @cramforce @rustybrick https://t.co/fmDvbRSyKI pic.twitter.com/jYoiqZNjFL
This seems to imply it's verified pic.twitter.com/d05PCypua0
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) August 28, 2025
Here is that chart from Cloudflare:
It is hard to say what is connecting all of this? Vercel, Fastly, WP Engine, not just Google but Bing. What is the pattern here?
Whatever happened, seems also present on Bing Bot behaviour... https://t.co/I12QwD25es pic.twitter.com/0uHG2qcY2p
— Pedro Dias (@pedrodias) August 28, 2025
We spent a lot of time looking at it. We were able to exclude all kinds of issues.
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) August 28, 2025
Most likely explanation is some kind of unexpected behavior of the crawl system. Aka a bug
It is hard to know who this impacted and did not impact but check your crawl stats report to see if you were impacted. I mean, not sure this impacted rankings much but hey.
Forum discussion at threads above.
UPDATE: Google's John Mueller confirmed it was an issue on Google's end:
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!
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) August 28, 2025 at 9:25 AM
He added on Bluesky, "It was reduced / fluctuating crawling from our side, for some sites." So not just a reporting issue but an actual crawling issue.
This story was originally published at 7:11 am ET but was updated with Google's statement at 9:30 am ET.
