Crawl frequency: server logs vs GSC Crawl Stats

Crawl frequency: server logs vs GSC Crawl Stats

Both claim to tell you how often Google crawls. They disagree, and the gap is the point.

→ GSC Crawl Stats — Google's own aggregate: total requests, average response time, host status. Easy, but it's site-wide and sampled, with no per-URL breakdown.
→ Server logs — the only source that tells you Googlebot hit /product/123 exactly four times this week and skipped /product/124 entirely. Granularity GSC will never give you.

⭐ Pick of the week: the reconciliation tip seasoned log analysts share — if your logs show far fewer Googlebot hits than GSC reports, you're likely behind a CDN swallowing the requests.

Takeaway: GSC for the trend and host health; raw logs when you need URL-level crawl frequency.