How to read the Crawl Stats report without fooling yourself

How to read the Crawl Stats report without fooling yourself

People screenshot this report and panic at the wrong line. Read it in this order:

— Total requests trend: flat or growing is healthy. A cliff drop means a host problem, not "Google lost interest."
— By response: 200/304 should dominate. A wall of 404s means you're feeding Googlebot dead links somewhere.
— By file type: HTML should lead for most sites. Surprise spikes in JS/JSON/Image mean a rendering or asset issue eating requests.
— By purpose: "Refresh" vs "Discovery." Mostly refresh = Google already knows your site; new pages aren't the constraint.
— Average response time: rising ms is the only number that genuinely throttles crawl rate.

Here's the thing: Google literally says crawl rate drops when your server slows. That's the one lever in this whole report you control.

Response time is the metric. The rest is mostly diagnosis.