Martin Splitt from Google posted a one-line question asking, “Should we do something to explain the crawl stats report in GSC?” This was posted on Mastodon, which has a small audience, but the responses were pretty good.

It obviously makes you think, well, maybe Google will add more detail, or help documentation, around the crawl stats report. I mean, there is already a help document that explains:

The Crawl Stats report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. For instance, how many requests were made and when, what your server response was, and any availability issues encountered. You can use this report to detect whether Google encounters serving problems when crawling your site.

In fact, it goes through a lot of detail, the document has 3,407 words and 20,114 characters – so it is far from a short explanation.

Here are some of the responses to the question Martin Splitt posted:

Simon Cox: If you do, will that open a door to explaining a lot more? 😉

Jon Henshaw: but if they did a better job of explaining what each area and metric means (in app and via documentation), then they could surface it in the main nav instead of hiding it under Settings. While you (Simon) and I may understand most of it as old fart SEOs, there’s a lot of deciphering that has to happen, especially if you’re newer to SEO. So the answer to all future questions of, “Should we explain this more?” will always be “Yes.”

Dave Smart: would **** to see more about it! Things like what the average response time is (that it’s almost time to last byte, not ttfb). Why things that are already indexed might be in discovery. But perhaps more just what actionable insights folks could, or should look for.

I wonder what Google is up to here…

Martin Splitt added when he saw this wrote:

“What is Google up to here?” Nothing.

I just got a remark from someone outside Google asking if we could explain crawl stats more. With our current docs on it being great, I’m not sure what that’d look like, even.

So I asked out loud to see if other people think the same. Few do, apparently.

Forum discussion at Mastodon.