15MB Googlebot Limit Now For Each Individual Subresource

Koshal Shelar is an SEO Analyst with 4 years of experience in helping businesses navigate the ever-evolving world of search. Having worked across various verticals, she possesses a diverse skillset encompassing keyword research, technical SEO, and content optimization. In

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Koshal Shelar

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The 15MB fetch size limit is applicable to each fetch of the individual subresources referenced in the HTML as well, including JavaScript and CSS files, according to an update to Googlebot’s help document on crawling.

Here’s what the new document reads:

Versus the previous version:

Thus, the new update clearly states that the 15MB resource fetch threshold is also applicable to Javascript resources, which means it isn’t conducive to having js files larger than this threshold limit. Having so may impact your website’s performance in search.

Earlier, in June 2022, Google announced an update to their search documentation that said that Googlebot only reads the first 15 MB of HTML files. Google’s search advocate, John Mueller, had also stated that this 15 MB threshold had been prevalent for many years and that it was simply added to the documentation because it may be useful for some people when debugging and because it seldom changes.

Googlebot is the umbrella term used for Google’s two web crawlers: Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Mobile. Google primarily indexes the mobile version of most websites’ content.