Search Console crawl stats is missing two days of data for a lot of properties right now: 15 and 16 August 2026. Open the report, and the chart jumps from the 15th straight to the 18th. Site owners started reporting it on 21 August, one of them putting it plainly: on the crawl stats screen, the data displayed after 15 August is shown as 18 August.
Google has not said anything about it. I checked the data anomalies page this morning, 22 August, which is the page where Google records exactly this kind of thing, and there is no entry for it. There are two other August entries, which I will come back to, but nothing about crawl stats.
Is Googlebot not crawling my site?
Almost certainly it is crawling fine, and this is the part worth being clear about before anyone starts changing things.
Crawl stats is a report. It reads from logging on Google’s side. When logging drops data, the report loses days; the crawler that did the crawling was a different system having a normal week. This is the same distinction that makes an empty Core Web Vitals “not enough data” screen a statement about the dataset rather than about your site. The two ways to tell them apart are on your side of the wire:
- Your own server logs, or your CDN’s request log, filtered to Googlebot. If your logs show Googlebot requests on 15 and 16 August, the crawl happened and Google’s chart is the only thing missing them. This is the one direct answer available and it takes a minute.
- The last crawl date in the URL Inspection tool, on a handful of URLs that get crawled often. Inspect a URL, look at the crawl date under Page indexing. If pages were fetched across those dates, again, the crawling happened.
If both of those look normal, you have your answer and there is nothing to fix. What you cannot do is recover the numbers. Google sometimes backfills, and a gap of this kind is usually within its power to repair, but it had not done so yet. Sometimes it never comes back: the same anomalies page records that 28 February and 1 March 2026 are missing from bulk data exports for some properties, with the flat sentence, “This data won’t be recovered.”
What August 2026 has done to Search Console data so far
Three separate reporting problems in one month, all documented, none of them related to each other:
The two logged ones matter more than they look, because they land in the same week people are measuring the August 2026 spam update, which finished rolling out on 21 August. The clean before window for that comparison is 11 to 17 August. Google’s own record says impressions for Generative AI in Search were under-reported from 13 to 17 August, which is most of that window. If your property has AI data in it and you compare before with after, the after will look better than it was. That is a measurement artefact, not a recovery.
Should I do anything about the crawl stats gap?
For most sites, no. Crawl stats is a report Google itself describes as aimed at advanced users, and its own documentation says if you have a site with fewer than a thousand pages you should not need to use it or worry about this level of crawling detail. Two missing days on a chart that is already a rough picture of a large site’s crawling changes no decision.
Where it does cost you something is if you were watching crawl stats for a reason: a migration, a server move, a crawl budget problem, a spike in 5xx responses. In that case the two missing days are two days of evidence you no longer have, and your server logs are the replacement. This is the argument for keeping your own logs in the first place, and it comes up every time Google’s reporting hiccups. Google’s report is a convenience. Your logs are the record.
It is also not the only Search oddity in this stretch. Icons went missing from search results in the same week, and that one Google has confirmed as a bug on its end: favicons disappearing from Google Search.
One thing genuinely worth checking while you are in there, because it is the failure that hides inside crawl totals: host status, then robots.txt fetching. Google counts crawls it would have made but did not, when robots.txt was unavailable for too long, which is why the report can show a total far above what your logs show. That is a real problem wearing the costume of a reporting quirk, and it is worth ruling out before you blame the gap. I wrote up that specific failure in failed: robots.txt unreachable.
What I am telling clients this week
Nothing, unless they ask. A two day hole in a diagnostic chart does not warrant an email. If somebody does ask, the answer is three sentences: it is a reporting gap on Google’s side, the logs show crawling continued, and the numbers may or may not come back.
The part I do act on is the measurement one. Every account I am comparing across the spam update window gets a note in the same spreadsheet where the 18 August line already lives: AI impressions under-reported 13 to 17 August, Discover under-reported 13 August, crawl stats missing 15 to 16 August. Three months from now, when somebody looks at that chart and sees a dip, the note is the difference between a diagnosis and a wild guess.
None of that is the same thing as the ordinary reporting lag, which is documented and predictable: Search Console data runs two to three days behind even when nothing is wrong. Rule out the lag before calling anything a gap.
Uncertain, and labelled as such: whether Google will backfill 15 and 16 August. It normally can. The February and March export gap says sometimes it does not. I would plan for it not coming back and be pleased if it does.
Update, 25 August 2026: the data came back
It came back. Google fixed the crawl stats gap on Sunday 23 August at around 5pm Eastern, and the fix was a backfill rather than a patch over the hole: the two missing days are populated in the report now, not skipped. Before and after charts went round the same evening. Google fixed the favicon bug over the same weekend, and on Monday 24 August it sent a wave of new owner added emails to people who were already owners, which Google also confirmed as a bug. Three defects in one month is worth naming, because the fourth thing you see is not automatically one.
So the guess above was wrong in the useful direction, and I would rather say that plainly than leave it. I told you to plan for the data not coming back. It came back inside 48 hours.
Two things I would keep from it anyway. The first is that “plan for it not coming back” is still the right posture during the gap, because at the time nobody knows which kind of gap it is, and the February and March export gap that never recovered is the same shape from the outside. Advice that only looks wrong once the answer arrives was not bad advice, it was a decision made without the answer. The second is the reason it did not matter much either way: the check that actually told you crawling was fine was in your own server logs, and that check was available on 21 August, two days before Google fixed anything.
One thing worth doing now that the numbers are back. If you took a screenshot or an export of crawl stats during the gap, that copy has a hole the live report no longer has. Anything you carried forward from it, a crawl budget note, a migration comparison, a 5xx spike count, is worth redoing against the repaired data before you make a decision on it.
A caveat, and I want to be exact about what I have and have not verified. Crawl stats has no public API, so there is no way to query this programmatically the way I checked the favicon endpoint, and no way for me to confirm the backfill across a set of properties in one pass. What I am reporting above is Google’s fix and the before and after charts other people posted, not a measurement of my own. The only way to confirm your own property is to open the report and look at 15 and 16 August. If yours still shows the jump, that is worth reporting, because a partial backfill would be a different story from the one above.
If you are reading Crawl Stats to work out where your crawling is going rather than to check for a gap in the data, what crawl budget is and which pages waste it maps the fetch cost of each Search Console status.
Sources
- Reports from site owners on the missing 15 and 16 August crawl stats, and on the backfill, 21 to 23 August 2026
- Google Search Console Help, data anomalies in Search Console, checked 22 August 2026
- Google Search Console Help, Crawl Stats report
- Google Search Status Dashboard, August 2026 spam update incident, completed 21 August 2026