Auditing your CDN before it silently blocks Googlebot

Auditing your CDN before it silently blocks Googlebot

Your "crawl budget" tanking is sometimes your own CDN firewall throttling the bot. Audit it:

— Check CDN/WAF rules for rate limits or bot-management that catch Googlebot.
— Pull CDN logs and look for 403/429/503 served TO verified Googlebot. Those are red flags.
— Confirm Googlebot isn't getting a JS challenge or CAPTCHA — it can't solve them.
— Verify by reverse DNS before whitelisting, so you don't open the door to fake bots.
— Test fetch as Googlebot via URL Inspection's live test to see what Google actually receives.

Here's the thing: a 503 or 429 to Googlebot is a direct "slow down" signal. Your security stack can throttle crawl harder than any budget limit.

Before blaming Google, check whether your own edge is showing it the door.