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Is Googlebot crawling your site?

Direct answer: grep your access log for the Googlebot user-agent — or drop the log in the checker below for visits, error hits and top paths. Then verify before trusting it: real Googlebot IPs reverse-resolve to googlebot.com / google.com hostnames. A UA string alone is a claim, not proof.

Check this log for Googlebot and friends

Drop an access log here — or click to choose one. Nginx/Apache combined or common format, read in slices on this device; nothing is uploaded.

Step 1 — Count the claims

In the checker results, Googlebot's row gives visits, error hits and top paths. Read the error hits first: a high share of 404s means the bot is spending fetches on dead URLs — sitemap entries for removed pages, internal links to retired routes. The top paths show what it actually fetched versus what you wish it had. The quick shell equivalent is grep -c "Googlebot" access.log, but that gives a count with no error or path context.

Step 2 — Verify the IPs you plan to act on

Pick the IPs behind the Googlebot user-agent and run reverse DNS (host 66.249.66.1 style). Real Google infrastructure resolves to *.googlebot.com or *.google.com, and the hostname must forward-resolve back to the same IP. Do this before blocking "Googlebot" (you might be blocking a scraper — good — or Google — catastrophic) and before celebrating a crawl surge (you might be applauding a scraper). Google also publishes its crawler IP ranges as JSON for allowlist checks.

Step 3 — Act on the shape, not the count

Three actionable shapes: errors concentrated on few paths (fix those URLs/redirects), visits that stop after a date (check robots.txt, server changes, DNS), and fetches dominated by junk parameters (crawl-budget waste from faceted navigation). The raw visit count, week to week, is mostly weather. For the rest of the crawler zoo — especially the AI crawlers that arrived recently — see AI crawlers in your server logs.

Frequently asked questions

How can I tell if Googlebot visits are real?

Verify the IP: a genuine Googlebot address reverse-resolves to a hostname ending in googlebot.com or google.com, and that hostname forward-resolves back to the same IP. Google publishes this as the official verification method because user-agent strings are trivially spoofed — scrapers and SEO-tool impersonators send Googlebot’s UA constantly, and some do it to slip past bot filters.

Googlebot is in my log but Search Console says pages aren’t indexed. Why?

Crawling and indexing are different steps. The log shows requests (crawling happened); indexing additionally needs the page to return 200, allow indexing (no noindex, robots not blocking resources), and pass quality selection. If the bot’s visits cluster on 404s/redirects in the checker results, fix those first — wasted fetches are the visible, fixable part.

How often should Googlebot visit?

There is no healthy quota: crawl rate adapts to site size, update frequency and server response. What matters diagnostically is change (a sudden drop after a migration, visits stopping after a robots.txt edit) and waste (a large share of fetches hitting errors). Compare like-for-like windows in the log rather than chasing an absolute number.