In short. Compare Discovery and Refresh within the same Crawl Stats property and reporting period, then inspect example requests and account for reporting scope.
Definition: As of October 2026, Search Console's Crawl Stats report groups crawl requests by purpose: Discovery means Google has never crawled the requested URL before; Refresh means Google recrawls a known page. Comparing these categories shows how crawling divides between first visits and repeat visits.
Key facts
- Google's Crawl Stats documentation defines Discovery and Refresh and provides example URLs within each purpose category.
- Google's crawl budget guide says Googlebot's crawl demand depends on site size, update frequency, page quality and relevance compared with other sites.
- Google's recrawl guidance distinguishes individual URL requests through URL Inspection from sitemap submission for many URLs.
Where are the categories, and how are they compared?
Google's report documentation gives this route to Crawl Stats; Crawl purpose is a grouping inside the report:
Search Console > Property settings > Crawl stats
The report is available for root-level properties, including Domain properties and root-level URL-prefix properties. A comparison uses the same property and reporting period for Discovery and Refresh. Opening each category in turn provides its detailed view and example URLs; opening an example shows details of that specific crawl request.
The comparison counts requests. Repeat requests for the same URL count individually, and the report includes requests for page resources hosted within the property's scope. For a server-side redirect, each request in the redirect chain counts separately. The report attributes activity to the actual requested URLs.
What do changes in Discovery and Refresh indicate?
Google's Crawl purpose explanation says that adding substantial new content or submitting a sitemap should ideally produce an increase in Discovery crawls. This is an expectation to compare with the report after those events. Refresh represents repeat crawling of pages Google already knows.
Google's crawl budget guide explains that its systems seek to recrawl documents frequently enough to pick up changes. More popular URLs tend to receive more frequent crawling. Site moves can also increase crawl demand while Google reprocesses content under new URLs.
For rapidly changing pages receiving too few recrawls, the Crawl Stats documentation recommends inclusion in a sitemap, a file listing URLs for search engines.
What can distort the comparison?
Google's data notes explain that potential crawls abandoned because robots.txt is unavailable count toward overall crawl totals. Purpose groupings can omit those attempts or contain limited information about them. Overall totals and the detailed purpose breakdown can therefore differ during robots.txt availability problems.
Property scope also affects the figures. A parent domain can include requests to its child domains, while a report scoped to one child excludes requests to its siblings. Crawl Stats includes both HTTP and HTTPS requests even for URL-prefix properties, although example URLs for those properties follow the property's specified protocol.
Related terms
- XML sitemap
- How do I inspect Google crawl failures in Search Console?
- How do I distinguish Googlebot types in Crawl Stats?
- How do I check host availability in Search Console Crawl Stats?
FAQ
Does an absent example URL mean Google has never crawled it?
No. Google's example URL guidance describes these lists as representative samples, so you cannot use absence from the list to establish that a URL was never requested.
Can I repeatedly request a recrawl to increase Refresh activity?
Google's recrawl instructions say repeated submissions of the same URL do not accelerate crawling. You must be an owner or full user of the Search Console property to request indexing through URL Inspection, and individual submissions have a quota.
Sources
- Google Search Console Help, "Crawl Stats report", accessed 18 October 2026
- Google Crawling Infrastructure, "Optimize your crawl budget", accessed 18 October 2026
- Google Search Central, "Ask Google to recrawl your URLs", accessed 18 October 2026
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