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I know it is highly website-dependent, but is there any statistics/study/report on the ratio of real visitors websites get and the visits made by the search engine crawler?

Services like Alexa reports an estimate of visitors and views a website received. I look for the same sort of information but also by considering the crawler visits (most importantly GoogleBot).

Specifically, I am interested in the ratio of Googlebot visits and the traffic websites received from Google Search Results. It is obviously available to webmasters through Google Search Console. I hope to find some public data (estimations, of course).

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  • What is a "visit" from Googlebot? Real visitors tend to come and view a few pages and then leave, so it is easy to classify a typical visit. Googlebot is always downloading pages from my sites. It is like a visit that never ends. Mar 1, 2022 at 20:11
  • @StephenOstermiller How many visits by Googlebot do you have per day? How many pageviews by real people do you have? How many real people come from Google Search results? I want to have the ratios of these numbers. What is the ratio of visits by Googlebot and the pageviews by people sent by Google Search?
    – Googlebot
    Mar 1, 2022 at 20:31

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For my sites overall, Google sends about twice as many referrals as it hits from Googlebot. Specifically in the month of February 2022, Googlebot did 2.7 million crawls and Google sent 5 million visitors.

But as you suspect, there is a lot of variation between the sites that I run. It depends on a lot of factors such as:

  • Number of pages on the site
  • Number of redirects on the site
  • How many URLs are blocked by robots.txt
  • The quality of the content
  • Interest in the content

I have a currency convertor that is translated into over sixty languages, each on a subdomain. The Chinese traditional subdomain had 60 thousand crawls and 600 thousand referrals (10 times as many referrals as crawling.) On the flip side the Irish translation had 31 thousand crawls and only 16 referrals (2,000 times as much crawling as referrals.)

In between, my personal site had 13 thousand crawls and 99 thousand referrals (7x) and my password creator had 1 thousand crawls and 3 thousand referrals (3X).

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  • Many thanks for sharing interesting information. May I ask how many pages your website have and how many have been indexed by Google? I just want to work out the performance of 2.7 million crawls.
    – Googlebot
    Mar 2, 2022 at 14:58
  • All of my sites have somewhere around 1 million pages together. I have no idea how many Google actually indexes. Its probably between 30% and 60% of them. Mar 2, 2022 at 15:02
  • Don't you use Google Search Console?
    – Googlebot
    Mar 2, 2022 at 15:04
  • I have a lot of sites and GSC doesn't show you a roll up of all of them. For my currency convertor, which is my largest site, GSC says I have 1.4 million valid pages and 3.2 million excluded URLs, most of which are redirects or alternate canonical. Mar 2, 2022 at 15:10

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