Your CDN is rate-limiting Googlebot and you call it a budget drop

Your CDN is rate-limiting Googlebot and you call it a budget drop

The silent killer: a security rule, WAF, or bot-management product on your CDN starts throttling or 429-ing Googlebot because the traffic "looked aggressive." Crawl craters. You blame Google's budget allocation.

No. You blocked the crawler. A 429 or 503 tells Googlebot to slow way down, and aggressive bot rules sometimes hit Googlebot's real IP ranges by accident — or block it entirely thinking it's a scraper.

The fix: verify Googlebot by reverse DNS, allowlist its verified ranges, and check your CDN logs for 4xx/5xx served specifically to Googlebot. Google publishes its IP ranges for exactly this.

Google isn't rationing your crawl. Your security stack is fighting the one bot you wanted to let in.