Crawl Stats: why August 15 and 16 are missing

The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console has a hole in it again: August 15 and 16, 2026 are simply gone — blank cells where the bars should be, and in some accounts the chart jumps straight from August 15 to the 18th. People spotted it on August 20, and Google had not fixed it at the time of writing.

Crawl Stats sits in property settings and shows how many requests Googlebot made, how fast the server answered and which response codes came back. It is one of very few reports that describes the crawler rather than the user — so any gap is obvious to anyone watching crawl budget.

The outage is documented by Search Engine Roundtable: complaints came from Glenn Gabe and other SEOs who tagged Google on X on Thursday. No response so far.

• data for August 15 and 16, 2026 is missing;
• only Crawl Stats is affected — the rest of Search Console reports fine;
• this is a reporting error, not a crawling one: Googlebot worked those days as usual;
• it has happened before — November 2021, February and May 2022, October 2025;
• Google has backfilled such gaps in the past, but has not done so this time yet.

The practical takeaway is simple: do not draw crawl budget conclusions from this week. If you are measuring the effect of technical work right now — a sitemap move, a redirect cleanup, a server response speed-up — shift the comparison window or pull the numbers from server logs instead. Logs, unlike Search Console, lose nothing and show the same Googlebot visits without a middleman.

It is also worth warning the client or your manager before they open the report and see the dip themselves: "it is an interface bug" lands far better in advance than as an answer.

The site was crawled on those days — the chart just does not know it.