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:
Heads-up. 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.… pic.twitter.com/6mN79X8CGs— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) August 27, 2025
Most of all GSC accounts show crawl requests dropping to zero on Aug 20. Anyone else seeing this? Bug in reporting? @JohnMu @googlesearchc @rustybrick @seroundtable pic.twitter.com/yVXbHxnyDi— Dhruv Pandya (dp) (@dhruvpandyadp) August 25, 2025
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.