<b>Stop guessing about crawl from Search Console. Read your logs</b>

<b>Stop guessing about crawl from Search Console. Read your logs</b>

The Crawl Stats report in Search Console is aggregated, sampled, and delayed. It tells you a vibe. Your server access logs tell you the truth: every Googlebot hit, every URL, every status code, every timestamp.

What logs reveal that dashboards hide: Googlebot hammering a faceted-filter trap you forgot about, re-crawling 301 chains hop by hop, spending half its visits on your paginated archive while your money pages get touched twice a month.

And verify the bot. Roughly a third of "Googlebot" in raw logs is spoofed. Do a reverse DNS lookup, real Googlebot resolves to googlebot.com or google.com. Filter the fakes before you draw a single conclusion.

Dashboards are someone's summary. Logs are the receipts.