Google Again Says Cache-Control Headers Aren’t Used For Crawling & Indexing Outside Of Embedded Content

In 2018, John Mueller of Google said Google does not use cache-control headers when crawling. He said then that the has no impact on GoogleBot and how it crawls your web pages. He said that again today, at the end of 2022, but added, “at most, they might be used in rendering for embedded content.”

John wrote on Mastodon, “Cache control headers don’t apply to Google’s crawling & indexing, they’re for browsers.” But then he added that “at most, they might be used in rendering for embedded content.”

The Cache-Control HTTP header field holds directives, in both requests and responses, that control caching in browsers and shared caches (e.g. Proxies, CDNs). It is an HTTP header used to specify browser caching policies in both client requests and server responses.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.