<b>Crawl frequency follows clicks, not freshness</b>

<b>Crawl frequency follows clicks, not freshness</b>

Correlation between a URL's organic clicks and its Googlebot hit rate, across 41 sites: r = 0.61. Correlation with last-modified date: r = 0.18.

— top-decile traffic pages: ~22 crawls/month ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
— median pages: ~3 crawls/month ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— bottom-decile (long tail): ~0.4 crawls/month ░░░░░░░░░░

Google re-crawls what users already validate. Your lastmod dates barely move the needle on their own.

So what: to get a stale page re-crawled, send it internal links from high-traffic URLs. Bumping lastmod alone earned a median +0.3 crawls/month — statistically close to noise.