Glenn Gabe noted that he is seeing some weird Google Googlebot activity recently, saying he is seeing “crawling spike across a number of sites” that started on January 12th through January 13th. I then checked some of the properties and noticed that on some, not most, I see the same.

So to be clear, this is not across all sites, in fact, it seems to be on less than 10% of the properties I personally have access to. But it is unusual behavior from Google. You may see this happen on a site here and there, espesially if there are large technical changes to the site. But normally you would not see it when there are not big changes like this.

Here is one of the screenshots Glenn shared on Twitter:

Glenn Gabe added “For most of the spikes, they fall under “Refresh” vs. “Discovery”, which makes sense… but still worth noting. Both Smartphone & Desktop spike for some.”

Others are seeing it also:

And just to clarify, I’m not saying this is a *bad* thing. Just interesting to see massive spikes in crawling on a number of sites all starting on the same day. 🙂 Would be interesting to hear if Google implemented any changes there from a crawling perspective.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 18, 2022

saw this for a minority of properties I have access to, but yes, super weird pic.twitter.com/9SQqGtWTJ6

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) January 18, 2022

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I noticed that too. Interestingly (and somewhat underlated) for one site I noticed 25% of Googlebot type was ‘Page resource load’. I’ve never seen it higher that 8%, usually around 3% – 4%. Any idea why that may be so high Glenn? pic.twitter.com/BBOKeb8Odq

— Chris Ainsworth (@chrisains) January 18, 2022

You can check your crawl stats report over here and let us know if you saw this spike as well?

Just a heads up, Google said that large crawl rate increases is not related to algorithm updates, although, sometimes it might be – maybe.

Forum discussion at Twitter.