What is Crawl demand?

Crawl demand is how much Google wants to crawl you, based on how popular and fresh your content is and how many URLs Google knows on your site. It’s the other half of crawl budget, the one response time never touches.

If your crawl demand is low, a faster server won’t change much: crawl capacity sets the ceiling, but demand decides how close Google even tries to get to it.

That’s why not every crawl drop is a server problem. When response time is flat and low and crawling still declines, it’s a demand story: content aging out, pages Google is losing interest in, or fewer URLs being discovered.