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.