Some Sites Get Crawled Every Hour. Yours Gets Crawled Every Week.
Why?
It is not random. Google decides crawl frequency based on a few key signals. And most of them are in your control.
What Determines Crawl Frequency
Update frequency. Sites that publish or update content regularly get crawled more often. Google learns your patterns. If you publish daily, it checks daily. If you publish quarterly, it checks quarterly.
Site authority. Higher-authority sites get more crawl budget. More backlinks, more traffic, more trust — more frequent crawling.
Server speed. If your server responds quickly, Google can crawl more pages per visit. If it is slow, Google throttles its crawl rate to avoid overwhelming your server. Fix your TTFB first.
Internal linking. Pages that are well-linked internally get discovered and re-crawled more frequently. Orphan pages get ignored.
How to Increase It
Publish consistently. Not just new content — update existing content too. Fresh last-modified dates signal to Google that the page has changed.
Fix your server speed. Get TTFB under 200ms. Google will increase its crawl rate when your server can handle it.
Build quality backlinks. Authority begets crawl budget. The more Google trusts your site, the more it crawls. Not sure where to start? Read our guide on what backlinks are and why they matter.
Submit updated sitemaps. With accurate lastmod dates. Google's sitemap documentation explains how these are used to prioritize what to re-crawl.
Use the Indexing API. For time-sensitive content (job postings, live events), Google's Indexing API can trigger near-instant crawling.
The Flywheel Effect
Faster server leads to more crawling. More crawling leads to faster indexing. Faster indexing leads to more traffic. More traffic leads to more authority. More authority leads to more crawling.
It compounds. But you have to start somewhere.
Start with our 113-task SEO checklist. Free. No credit card. 30 seconds. We have refined it over 500+ campaigns.