{
  "slug": "crawler-response-time",
  "name": "Crawler response time",
  "aliases": [
    "Crawler TTFB",
    "Average time taken"
  ],
  "definition": "How long your server took on average to answer a crawler's request.",
  "category": "Crawl and logs",
  "type": "raw measure",
  "unit": "not established",
  "direction": "neutral",
  "verification": "review",
  "aggregation": "An average of the per-request time-taken field across the matching log records, grouped by bot.",
  "grain": "One average per bot per date range.",
  "dimensions": [
    "bot_type"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date_range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "server-logs"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-bot-activity-report",
    "core-web-vitals-report",
    "crawl-log-report",
    "technical-seo-audit-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "crawl-efficiency-review",
    "technical-health-audit"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "ttfb_crawl_impact"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R1"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L1"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "How fast do we respond to Googlebot?",
    "Are crawlers being slowed down?"
  ],
  "caveats": [
    "Unit and direction are not established for this metric.",
    "The tool labels it explicitly: this is per-request server-hit latency, not a per-crawl-session measure, and the label rides on every response.",
    "Available on the internal tool surface only today.",
    "It is an unweighted average across requests, so a burst of fast static asset fetches will pull it down.",
    "Same origin-only caveat as all log reads."
  ],
  "freshness": "hours to nightly, depends on how logs are shipped; the card carries the ingestion time.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Reading it as time to first byte for a page load as a visitor would experience it.",
    "Rendering it with a unit taken from a name-based formatter, which will not agree with the field name.",
    "Painting a rise as an improvement because the direction oracles default it to higher-is-better."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "largest-contentful-paint",
      "why": "Server response latency to a crawler is not page-render speed for a visitor. They are different measurements from different sources and neither predicts the other."
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "bot-hits",
    "status-code-hits"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}