How Often Should You Crawl Your Own Site?
Match crawl frequency to deploy frequency, not to a calendar. Sites that ship weekly should crawl weekly; a brochure site that changes twice a year needs monthly at most. The exception is the crawl immediately after any deploy that touches templates, routing or robots.txt — that one is worth running every time.
The wrong way to decide
Most teams pick a frequency because it sounds diligent — daily feels professional, monthly feels lax. Both are arbitrary if they aren't tied to how often the site actually changes.
A crawl's value is in the difference from the last one. Crawling a static site daily produces 29 identical reports a month, which trains everyone to stop opening them. Crawling a fast-moving site monthly means a template regression can live in production for four weeks.
The right question is: how long am I willing to serve a broken page without knowing?
Frequency by site type
| Site | Crawl | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Brochure / small business, rarely edited | Monthly | Little changes; monthly catches rot and expiring links |
| Blog or content site publishing weekly | Weekly | New pages need checking as they land |
| SaaS marketing site with active deploys | Weekly + per deploy | Template changes are the main risk |
| E-commerce with changing inventory | Weekly | Stock and price changes break markup quietly |
| Client sites under retainer | Monthly, before reporting | Aligns with the deliverable |
| Post-migration | Daily for a week | The one case where daily earns its keep |
If you're paying per scan, note that crawl quota is usually the binding constraint on a small plan — which is another argument for matching frequency to change rate rather than crawling on reflex.
See this on your own site. isaeo audits up to 10 pages free — no card, no trial timer. You get an SEO health score, an AEO score and a prioritised fix list.
Run a free audit →The deploy crawl
Regardless of your schedule, crawl after any deploy that touches:
- Templates or theme files — the source of most site-wide heading, title and canonical regressions
- Routing or URL structure — where the 404s come from
- robots.txt or meta robots — where the catastrophes come from
- Anything generating structured data
These are the changes that break hundreds of pages at once rather than one. The scheduled crawl will find them eventually; the deploy crawl finds them while the person who caused it still remembers what they changed.
What to look at each time
Don't re-read the whole report. Read the diff — new issues, resolved issues, new and removed pages, score movement. That's the entire point of crawling repeatedly, and it's covered in what to look at after a re-crawl.
Three signals worth reacting to immediately, whatever your cadence: a jump in broken pages, a drop in indexable page count, and any appearance of noindex on pages that shouldn't have it. Everything else can wait for the monthly review pass.
Try it on a site you care about
isaeo can run audits on a schedule and diff each one against the last, so you read what changed instead of the whole report.
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Frequently asked questions
How often should I run an SEO audit?
Match it to how often your site changes. Weekly for actively developed or frequently published sites, monthly for stable brochure sites, and daily for the first week after a migration.
Should I crawl after every deploy?
Crawl after deploys touching templates, routing, robots.txt or structured data — those break many pages at once. Routine copy edits don't need their own crawl.
Does crawling my own site affect SEO?
No. A crawler requesting your pages doesn't influence rankings. On very large sites, be mindful of server load and crawl during quieter periods.