Google Already Told You Where Your Site Stalls. The Report Is Three Clicks Away

Let me start with what Google itself says about the report I am about to show you.

Its help page reads: “If you have a site with fewer than a thousand pages, you shouldn’t need to use this report”. And right below it: “this report is aimed at advanced users”. ¹

I kept that line in mind and opened the report on a site with 42 URLs.

I found two things that show up on no other screen in Search Console.

What this screen shows is how much effort Google spent on your site, and on what. This is called crawl budget.

Where it lives, and what it shows

The path is short. In Search Console, open Settings and then Crawl stats.

The panel at the top carries three numbers. On the example site, on August 30, 2026, there were 47 crawl requests. The total download size came to 584K. And the average response time sat at 169. ²

The third number has an official definition, and it pays to know it: “average response time for all resources fetched from your site during the specified period”. ³

All resources, not only pages. Images, style sheets, and scripts go into that average.

First thing that showed up: seventeen percent going to redirects

Right below the chart sits a block called By response. On the example site:

OK (200)                     79%
Moved permanently (301)      17%
Not found (404)               4%

Stop at the second number.

Almost a fifth of Google’s requests on that site went to a redirect. Not to content. To a sign saying “the content lives at another address”.

The site has 42 URLs and went live a few days ago. It is not an old site carrying years of accumulated structural changes. Even so, 17%.

A redirect is not an error. It exists to preserve an old address, and it is the right thing to do in a migration. What this screen shows is its price, and that price appears in no other report.

Second thing: two sites being crawled instead of one

Further down there is a block called Hosts. It lists the addresses Google crawled. In the example, two showed up:

seodeentidade.com          44 requests
www.seodeentidade.com       3 requests

To you they are the same site. To Google they are two addresses, and it spent requests on both.

Three requests sound like very little. At this scale they are. But the number is not the point: the point is that this screen tells you there are two, and no other report does.

On a site with 42 URLs this is a curiosity. On one with 40,000, at the same ratio, it is crawl budget draining into a copy of your own site.

What the report leaves out, and Google says so

Two caveats sit in the official documentation, and both change how you read the numbers.

The first: “currently reports most crawl requests, but some requests might not be counted for various reasons”. Most requests, not all of them. ⁴

The second: requests to resources hosted on other domains are not counted. If your site loads a font, a script, or an image from outside, that traffic exists and does not appear here. ⁵

Put the two together and you get a ruler. The numbers on this screen are for comparing the site against itself over time. They are not for infrastructure auditing, and they will not reconcile with your server log.

The report window is 90 days. ⁶

The reading prompt

Export the report and paste it into this structure. It gives back a reading, not a finished diagnosis.

You are a technical SEO analyst.

I am going to paste the export of the Crawl stats report
from Google Search Console.

Give me back, in this order:

1. the breakdown by response, and how much of the total went
   to something other than 200
2. how many distinct hosts appear and the ratio between them
3. the average response time and how it moved over the period
4. the breakdown by file type, and whether any type consumes
   more than its share of the site justifies

For each item, say what the number shows and what it does NOT
allow anyone to conclude.

Do not invent a number that is not in the export. If a data
point is missing from the file, write "not in the export".

What it does: it organizes the reading and forces a split between what the data shows and what it does not show.

What it does not do: the audit. The AI reads the export. The auditing is done by whoever knows what to ask, and that is why the prompt’s last instruction exists.

Why not ask the AI straight, with no export

A generic question about technical SEO gives back a generic list of best practices. It can be correct and have nothing to do with your site.

With the export, the conversation changes in kind. You stop asking for an opinion and start asking for a reading of data that already exists. Data that is yours, and that Google collected without you asking.

Back to the line at the top

Google says a site with fewer than a thousand pages does not need this report. It is right about what it is saying: you do not need to manage crawl budget at that scale.

The trouble is that the line gets read as “do not open it”. Opening it is another matter.

On a site with 42 URLs, ten minutes on this screen showed 17% redirects and two hosts competing. Both are cheap to fix now, and expensive once the site grows with them inside.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need this report if my site is small?

By Google’s account, sites with fewer than a thousand pages do not need it to manage crawl budget. Opening it to check responses and hosts is another conversation, and it takes ten minutes. ¹

Do the numbers match my server log?

They should not. Google states that the report shows most crawl requests, not all of them, and that resources on other domains are left out of the count. ^{4 5}

How far back does the history go?

The report works with the last 90 days. ⁶

Does the AI run the audit on its own?

It reads the export and organizes it. The questions stay yours, and the prompt’s final instruction exists precisely so it says when a data point is missing from the file.

Notes and sources

1. Search Console Help, “Crawl Stats report”, support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9679690, consulted on September 1, 2026. Literal quotations reproduced in the body.
2. Google Search Console, seodeentidade.com property, Settings and Crawl stats. Capture of September 1, 2026, with the report last updated on August 30, 2026 and a window of August 26 to August 30, 2026. The property is the author’s own site, published in Portuguese.
3. Average response time definition, same source as note 1.
4. Caveat stated by Google, same source as note 1: the report covers most crawl requests, and some may not be counted for various reasons.
5. Requests to resources hosted on other domains are not counted. Same source as note 1.
6. The 90-day window of the report. Same source as note 1.