Site Checks: standing safety checks for crawler access and security hygiene

A new Site Checks page continuously watches your logs for the problems that silently hurt search visibility — Googlebot being blocked or rate-limited, unreliable robots.txt serving, sensitive files exposed — and alerts you the moment a check starts failing.

Some of the most damaging site problems never show up as errors you'd notice. A rate limiter that catches Googlebot. A robots.txt that intermittently returns errors, causing Google to back off crawling your entire site. These issues can cost months of organic traffic before anyone connects the symptoms to the cause — we've seen a real case where exactly this took a team months of external investigation to pin down.

LogLens now checks for these automatically. The new Site Checks page (under Analytics) evaluates your last 7 days of traffic every night against a set of standing safety checks:

Crawler access

  • Googlebot isn't being blocked or rate-limited
  • Search crawlers aren't receiving 429 responses
  • robots.txt is served reliably to crawlers (no 4xx/5xx)
  • robots.txt fetch cadence looks healthy (excessive refetching suggests it's being served uncacheably)
  • Your sitemap is being fetched and returning 200s
  • AI crawler access — which AI bots are allowed, partially blocked, or fully blocked (with no judgement: if blocking is intentional, that's fine)

Security hygiene

  • No sensitive files (.env, .git, backups, config) returning 200 to probes
  • Bot impersonation levels — how much claimed-Googlebot traffic fails IP verification
  • Unidentified bot share — how much of your bot traffic can't be classified

Every verdict comes with the evidence behind it: expand any check to see the actual numbers from your logs. Checks that lack enough traffic to judge are marked N/A rather than guessed at.

When a check starts failing — Googlebot suddenly blocked, robots.txt suddenly erroring — an alert goes out through your email streams immediately. Recoveries are announced too. Steady state stays quiet: the page shows standing status, alerts fire only on change.

← Site Checks phase 2: active probes and serving-quality checksPage Importance: see which pages Google actually cares about →
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