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Google now crawl less of your website. Here's the facts
Google has changed how much of your website it crawls. Here are the facts.
▶Play the video: Google now crawl less of your website. Here's the factsHere’s what actually happened.
On 31 January 2026, Google updated its Googlebot documentation. It now says there’s a 2 megabyte limit for crawling HTML and other supported text-based files, and a 64 megabyte limit for crawling PDFs.
That’s a real change. The limit used to be 15 megabytes.
If you don’t know what Googlebot is, it’s the generic name for the two types of web crawler Google uses to read your website and save the information into its search results. So this limit is about how much of each file Google’s crawlers will take in.
That’s it. One documentation update, two new numbers, and one old number to compare them with. No need to panic.
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Read the full transcript
Here's what's actually happened. On January 31st, 2026, Google have updated their Googlebot documentation to say that they now have a 2 megabyte limit for crawling HTML and supported textbased files. The limit is 64 megabytes for crawling PDFs. This is legitimately a big change because the limit used to be 15 megabytes. And also, if you don't actually know what Google bot is, it's just the generic name for two types of web crawlers used by Google to save information from your website into their search results.