Google Crawl Stats Report Doesn’t Show Location Of Crawl

As you know, Google can now crawl from locations outside of the United States. We know this is rare, it is used in specific situations. But if you want to know if Google is crawling your site from outside of the US, then you need to check your log files.

You cannot use the crawl stats report in Google Search Console to see the location Googlebot is crawling your site.

I mean, it would be neat if the “crawl requests breakdown” showed by location or region but it only shows by response, by file type, by purpose and by Googlebot type. Here is a screenshot:

John Mueller of Google was asked about this and responded on Mastodon saying, “From a practical POV, I’d look at your server logs. My guess is almost all of the requests will continue to come from the same locations. I’d see the different locations more as a way of dealing with broken websites on the messy web, and less of something to aim for.”

He added that maybe sometime in the future it might change but right now, it is rare. “Maybe that will change over time, maybe the web will be more geographically splintered? It’s hard to judge how the web will evolve,” he added.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.