The only crawl-rate playbook that works: get faster

The only crawl-rate playbook that works: get faster

You can't manually crank crawl rate up anymore — the Search Console limiter was retired. The real control is server response. Steps:

— Pull average response time from Crawl Stats. Rising trend = Google is throttling you.
— Check for 5xx and timeouts in logs during crawl spikes. Those tell Google to back off hard.
— Reduce TTFB on the HTML response specifically — that's what Googlebot waits on.
— Cache aggressively at the edge so bot hits don't hit origin.
— Watch "Host status" in Crawl Stats stay green for 90 days before expecting rate to rise.

Actually Google states it plainly: a faster, healthier server gets a higher crawl rate; a slow or erroring one gets a lower one. That's the whole mechanism.

There is no "crawl more" button. There's just a server that can take it, or can't.