Google: Limiting crawling to 15 MB is often misunderstood

June 30, 2022

The news that Google only crawls the first 15 MB of HTML on websites has led to misunderstandings and shows that statements made by Google are often not or not fully understood.

Google only crawls the first 15 MB of webpage HTML. This message has been circulating for the past week. This is not new, but has now only been clearly communicated by Google.

Unfortunately, the news has led to all sorts of misunderstandings. Even large and renowned international SEO websites sometimes reported incorrectly. For example, there was talk of a new restriction. The 15 MB limit is not new at all.

A number of other misinterpretations were also frequently found. Some assumed that images and other media would also be included in the 15 MB. That’s not the case. The 15 MB applies only to the HTML of web pages and certain text files that Google can crawl.

There were also recommendations to put important information at the beginning of websites because of the restrictions. John Müller wrote on Reddit: “In 15 MB you can accommodate ‘War and Peace’ more than five times. Anyone who gives such recommendations has probably never looked at an HTML page”:

“That doesn’t make much sense, you’d have to include war and peace over 5 times to get to 15mb. I suspect the author has never looked at a HTML page.”

In fact, a web page larger than 15 MB has very different problems than Google’s possibly incomplete crawling. Such large pages are an impertinence, especially for mobile use.