How do you see where spider bots are crawling on your website?
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You can see spider-bot locations on your website by analysing your server access logs, which record every request a crawler makes — including the URL visited, the timestamp, the bot's user-agent string and its IP address. Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool and Crawl Stats report give you a filtered, Google-specific view without log analysis.
Key takeaways
Server access logs are the most complete source of spider-bot data: they capture every crawler visit, not just those from Google.
Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report shows crawl requests per day, response codes and file types fetched — all specific to Googlebot.
Bing Webmaster Tools provides an equivalent crawl report for Bingbot, covering the same core metrics.
Bots identify themselves via user-agent strings in log entries; the most commonly seen legitimate crawlers include Googlebot, Bingbot, Slurp (Yahoo) and Applebot.
Unexpected bot traffic concentrated on a single directory or parameter can signal crawl waste, thin content or a potential security concern worth investigating.
What is a spider bot, and what does it actually do?
A spider bot (also called a web crawler) is an automated programme that follows links across the web, fetching and indexing page content on behalf of a search engine or third-party service. When it visits your site, it makes HTTP requests just as a browser would. The difference is that it identifies itself through a user-agent string rather than a human session.
Googlebot, for example, visits URLs it has discovered through sitemaps and links, downloads the HTML, and passes the content back to Google's indexing pipeline. It does not render every page the way a browser does, though it can process JavaScript when resources allow.
How do server logs show you where bots are crawling?
Every time a bot requests a URL on your site, your web server writes a line to the access log. That line typically contains:
The IP address of the requesting bot
The timestamp of the request
The HTTP method and URL path requested
The HTTP response code returned by your server
The user-agent string the bot declared
To see spider-bot locations, you filter those log entries by known bot user-agent strings. A line from a Googlebot visit might look like this in a standard combined log format:
66.249.66.1 - - [13/Aug/2026:09:14:02 +0000] "GET /services/seo/ HTTP/1.1" 200 - "Googlebot/2.1"
Filtering every log line that contains "Googlebot" gives you a full picture of which URLs Google has crawled, how often and with what result codes. Log analysis tools such as Screaming Frog Log File Analyser and Semrush's Log File Analyser automate this filtering and produce visual summaries.
What does Google Search Console show you about bot locations?
Google Search Console gives you a cleaner, less technical view of Googlebot's crawl activity, without touching a log file. Two reports are relevant:
Crawl Stats report (Settings › Crawl Stats) shows total crawl requests over 90 days broken down by response code, file type and crawl purpose. It does not show you individual URLs, but it tells you whether Googlebot is spending crawl budget on HTML pages, images, CSS or JavaScript.
URL Inspection tool lets you enter any specific URL and see the last time Googlebot crawled it, what it saw, and how it rendered the page. This is useful for checking whether a specific page has been visited and indexed correctly.
For SEO purposes, these two tools cover the vast majority of what a small business needs to know. If you want to audit crawl efficiency across your full site, including non-Google bots, log analysis is necessary.
How do you tell a legitimate crawler from a bad bot?
User-agent strings are self-declared, which means any bot can claim to be Googlebot. Legitimate crawlers can be verified by reverse DNS lookup: the IP address of a genuine Googlebot request resolves to a hostname ending in googlebot.com or google.com. Google publishes its crawler IP ranges, and Bing does the same for Bingbot.
Bot requests that fail reverse DNS verification, claim to be Googlebot but come from unrecognised IP ranges, or hammer a single URL path repeatedly are worth investigating. At Revolve, we treat unexplained bot concentrations on parameter URLs or low-value pages as a crawl waste signal that can drag down overall indexing efficiency.
When should you invest time in spider-bot location tracking?
For most small business websites with under a few hundred pages, Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report is sufficient. Log analysis becomes genuinely valuable when:
You have a large site (thousands of pages) and want to confirm Googlebot is reaching your most important content
You notice indexing delays or unexpected deindexing of pages
You suspect crawl budget is being wasted on paginated, filtered or duplicate URLs
You want to audit non-Google crawlers or identify hostile scraper bots
As a digital marketing agency working with UK small businesses, we find that crawl budget issues tend to surface on e-commerce sites with faceted navigation or on sites that have recently migrated domains. Those are the situations where pulling and analysing log files earns its time.
If improving how search engines find and index your pages is a priority, our AEO agency work covers technical crawl audits as part of a broader search visibility strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I see spider-bot activity without access to server logs? Yes. Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report and URL Inspection tool show Googlebot's activity directly, and Bing Webmaster Tools does the same for Bingbot. For a broader view covering all crawlers, you need server log access, which your hosting provider can usually grant or export for you.
Do spider bots slow down my website? A well-behaved crawler like Googlebot respects your server's response times and backs off when it detects load. Poorly configured or hostile bots can cause measurable load. If you see a spike in server resource usage coinciding with unusual bot traffic in your logs, rate limiting via your robots.txt crawl-delay directive or your server firewall is the practical fix.
What is a robots.txt file and how does it affect where bots crawl? A robots.txt file sits at the root of your domain and instructs crawlers which paths they are allowed or disallowed from visiting. Googlebot and Bingbot respect these rules; malicious scrapers do not. Keeping your robots.txt accurate prevents crawlers spending time on admin pages, duplicate content or development directories that should never be indexed.
Is Googlebot the only search engine crawler I need to worry about? For most UK small businesses, Googlebot accounts for the majority of organic search traffic, so it is the priority. Bingbot is worth monitoring because Bing feeds results to several AI assistants and voice search platforms. If you publish syndicated content or run a media site, crawlers from Apple (Applebot), LinkedIn and others may also appear in your logs.
How often does Googlebot crawl a typical small business website? Crawl frequency depends on how often your site changes, its authority and its overall health. A small, stable brochure site might see Googlebot visit key pages once every few weeks. An active blog or e-commerce site that publishes frequently and earns regular links will typically be crawled more often. The Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console shows your actual frequency, which is more reliable than any general estimate.
Written by the Revolve team — a full-service digital marketing agency based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, delivering SEO, AEO, paid advertising and content strategy for UK small and mid-sized businesses.
Last updated: 20 September 2026
