Google Search Crawling & Improvements To Crawling

Google posted a new “Search Off The Record” podcast yesterday on the topic of crawling where John Mueller, Lizzi Sassman, and Gary Illyes spoke about how Google crawls, some ideas on how to make crawling more efficient and some misconceptions around crawl frequency and site quality.

I don’t think anything in this podcast is particularly new, outside of Gary saying Google is looking into a “new kind of chunked transfer” proposed by someone on the IETF Track, Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF is a standards body which is also where Robots Exclusion Protocol is part of.

So Gary said, “I’m watching that closely to see where it’s going.” If the “new kind of chunked transfer” works, that might make crawling a bit more efficient.

Gary did say one of his projects in 2024 was to look to make crawling more efficient and that he wants to crawl less.

I was hoping they would mention IndexNow from Bing but they did not.

It is a good listen, hit play and listen in the background:

Forum discussion at X.