Numerous SEOs and site owners reported significant declines in crawl rates recorded in Google Search Console beginning around August 8 and continuing thereafter. Most sites were unaffected, but many large sites across platforms such as Vercel, WP Engine, and Fastly experienced steep drops. Bing crawling appeared less affected for some sites. Platforms initially reported no internal issues. Vercel's CTO reported a global Googlebot crawl-rate decrease of about 30%, with crawling to a small number of large sites dropping near zero before Google restored normal behavior.
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. My client is not blocking crawling of Googlebot, and Bing seems totally fine crawling-wise.
I think these platforms were asked about it and said all is good on their end. In fact, Vercel's CTO, Malte Ubl wrote on X this morning, "There was a major event where the global Googlebot crawl rate dropped by 30%. It manifested in a way where crawling to a relatively small number of large sites dropped to near 0. Behavior was restored on Google's side and crawling is back to baseline https://bots.fyi/d/googlebot."
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