Ahrefs orphan report vs log files for finding orphans

Two tools, two definitions of 'orphan', and they disagree hard.
— Ahrefs/crawler orphans: pages in your sitemap with no internal links pointing in. Finds the structural gaps fast.
— Log file analysis: pages Googlebot never crawls. Finds the pages that are technically linked but so buried bots ignore them.
The play: I run the crawler orphan report first for the obvious wins, then pull 30 days of server logs to catch the 'linked but starved' pages no crawler flags.
Logs are the real truth — a page can have 5 internal links and still get zero crawls if they're all at depth 7. Crawl-frequency beats link-count.