Crawl budget: server logs vs. GSC Crawl Stats

Crawl budget: server logs vs. GSC Crawl Stats
This week on the radar — diagnosing why Google isn't recrawling fast enough after you fixed things.

🔗 [Server log analysis] — ground truth: every Googlebot hit, by URL, status, and time; nothing else shows actual crawl distribution.
🔗 [GSC Crawl Stats] — Google's own summary of requests, response times, and fetch purpose; easier, but aggregated and sampled.
🔗 [GSC URL Inspection 'last crawl'] — per-URL recrawl date when you need to confirm one important page got refreshed.

The tradeoff: Crawl Stats is fast and free but won't show you that 60% of crawl is being wasted on parameter URLs — logs will. On a large site recovering from an update, log analysis finds the crawl-budget leak; GSC only hints at it.

One to bookmark: a log-based 'crawl by directory' breakdown — it exposes where Googlebot is spending budget you'd rather it spent on money pages.