Google Crawling Behavior Shows A Dramatic Drop Off Of Crawling Activity Beginning On 11 November 2021

There have been an ongoing discussions over the past few weeks across social media that Googlebot has dramatically reduced its crawling. For example, the founder of a web crawl analysis service Seolyzer tweeted a graph showing how Google’s crawl activity has declined since November 11, 2021. Some of the theories floating around:

• Some have noted a pattern with Googlebot suddenly no longer crawling pages that serve a 304 (Not Modified) server response code.
• Another person noticed reduced crawls on travel pages but a crawl increase on ecommerce pages.
• One person tweeted that Google increased indexing after removing a cookie consent bar.
• Perhaps Googlebot’s indexing patterns have changed.
• etc