Crawl Rate
01 Definition
Crawl Rate meaning: How many requests a crawler makes to your site within a set time.
Crawl rate is the speed at which a search engine sends requests to your server, such as requests per second. Search engines adjust it based on your server's response times and errors, slowing down if the site seems strained. It is one part of overall crawl budget.
Also called
Why it matters
How Crawl Rate fits the work
A crawl rate that is too high can strain your server, while a healthy rate keeps content fresh in the index without hurting site performance for real users.
In context
After a server upgrade, Googlebot raised its crawl rate from 2 to about 8 requests per second because pages began responding faster.
Practical note
Google retired the manual crawl rate limiter in Search Console; it now adjusts automatically. If crawling overloads your server, return HTTP 500 or 503 responses to signal it to slow down.