GSC coverage report vs server logs for crawl diagnosis

GSC coverage report vs server logs for crawl diagnosis

"Discovered - currently not indexed" piling up? The report tells you the symptom; logs tell you the cause.

GSC's Page Indexing report buckets URLs by state but won't say when or if Googlebot last visited a specific stalled URL. Raw server logs show every Googlebot hit, frequency, and status code per path, so you can prove crawl starvation vs a crawl-then-reject.

Pros (coverage): no setup, grouped reasons, free.
Cons (coverage): sampled, no per-URL crawl timestamp, lags.
Pros (logs): exact crawl frequency, catches budget waste on junk URLs, status codes.
Cons (logs): needs log access + a parser (Screaming Frog Log Analyser £99/yr, or GoAccess free), noisy.

Best for: coverage report to spot the trend, logs to confirm whether "Discovered not indexed" is a crawl-budget problem or a quality problem. Logs are NOT for sites without server access (managed hosts). 4.5/5 logs when you can get them.