Since late last week, there has been a spike in Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool showing a “failed: hostload exceeded” error. Google’s John Mueller said on Friday they are investigating, but on Sunday, John said it was related to spamming the tool causing these errors. He said normal indexing is working fine, just this method, I guess, is a bit overloaded.

It seems that if you are getting this error, it is an issue on Google’s end, and you should probably wait it out and try back in a few days. Again, Google crawls the web and finds URLs normally, so you should not need to use the URL inspection tool to submit URLs to Google’s crawl queue. But if you do and get this error, and you need the URL indexed, maybe link to the URL from that site’s home page instead?

Here is one of the many screenshots of this error:

I assume Google needs the Search Console team to dig into these spam attempts and try to block them before this issue gets fully resolved. But at this point, if you are getting this error, you really don’t need to worry about it because it is an error on Google’s end and not yours.

Initially Google thought the issue was with the site’s host not responding but it was not, this specific issue is with Google being overloaded by spammers using this tool:

We’ve been looking more at this and the other similar reports in the forum, and I don’t have a conclusive answer. It doesn’t feel as definitive as it usually is with this error, sorry … I’ll update here once we know more. cc @CrownRift @expomaster2 @ChrisRadny @CryptoShooting

— I am John (@JohnMu) October 20, 2023

People are spamming the Inspect URL / Submit to Indexing tool – normal indexing works fine.

— I am John (@JohnMu) October 22, 2023

Although John said normal indexing is fine:

I wouldn’t worry about it – normal crawling and indexing is generally fine.

— I am John (@JohnMu) October 22, 2023

I should add, Google has had these issues a few times over the years and generally has blamed abuse for the cause of those issues.

Personally, I almost never use the request indexing feature in the URL Inspection Tool. I understand why some SEOs use it as part of their daily SEO tasks, it keeps them busy, but good quality sites should not need to ask Google to index their content manually, Google will just do it on its own.

John did repost this:

Something like this?https://t.co/abvDhcIwXZ

— I am John (@JohnMu) October 22, 2023

Note, Google has this error documented here, it says, “Hostload exceeded: Your site seems to be at maximum capacity for Google crawling or inspection requests. Google can’t run tests until your traffic load (as estimated by Google) drops.”

Forum discussion at X and tons of complaints in the Google Webmaster Help Forums.

Note: This story was originally written Sunday, October 22 at 9am ET and was updated Monday, October 23rd at 5:20am ET and again at 7:45am ET.