Google reveals 75% of crawl problems come from two URL mistakes

Google says most crawling problems still come down to the same technical traps—and they’re costing sites real performance.

During a discussion of Google Search’s 2025 year-end crawling and indexing report, Google’s Gary Illyes said faceted navigation and action parameters account for roughly 75% of crawl waste. He shared the insight on the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, published today.

According to Illyes, these issues repeatedly trap Googlebot in massive, near-infinite URL spaces. Once crawlers fall into those loops, they burn crawl budget, strain servers, and slow sites to a crawl.

“Once it discovers a set of URLs, it cannot make a decision about whether that URL space is good or not unless it crawls a large chunk of that URL space,” Illyes explained. “By then, it’s often too late.”

The biggest crawling challenges Google sees

Google broke down the most common sources of crawl waste:

• 50% from faceted navigation

Common on e-commerce sites, faceted filters like size, color, price, and availability can generate endless URL combinations that lead to largely identical pages.

• 25% from action parameters

These parameters trigger actions (such as sorting, adding to cart, or session handling) rather than delivering meaningful, indexable content.

• 10% from irrelevant parameters

Includes session IDs, tracking codes, and UTM parameters that add noise without changing page value.

• 5% from plugins or widgets

Some third-party tools automatically generate URLs that confuse crawlers or create duplicate paths.

• 2% from miscellaneous edge cases

This includes double-encoded URLs, malformed parameters, and other unusual technical issues.

Read More: According to Google, 5 Common SEO Mistakes That Are Killing Your Rankings

Why it matters

Poor URL hygiene doesn’t just affect SEO rankings. Crawl traps can overload servers, slow page delivery, delay content discovery, and cause search engines to struggle with canonicalization and indexing priorities.

For site owners, especially e-commerce and large content platforms, managing crawl behavior is critical. Using tools like proper canonical tags, parameter handling in Google Search Console, robots.txt rules, and thoughtful internal linking can prevent bots from wasting time in unproductive URL spaces.

In short, clean URLs and controlled navigation aren’t optional anymore; they’re foundational to performance, visibility, and site stability.