Prompt
what should I use to spot crawl waste in server logs
Latest observation
To spot crawl waste in server logs, use a log analysis tool that lets you identify:
- Bots hitting low-value URLs
- Repeated crawling of duplicate or parameterized pages
- 404s, 5xxs, redirects, and soft-404s
- Pages crawled often but rarely changed
- Crawl activity by user-agent, status code, and URL pattern
Good options include:
Common tools
- Screaming Frog Log File Analyser — very popular for SEO crawl analysis
- Oncrawl — good for large sites and detailed bot/crawl reporting
- Botify — strong for enterprise-level log analysis
- Splunk / ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) — flexible if you want custom dashboards
- GoAccess — lightweight and fast for quick log summaries
What to look for in the logs
Focus on:
- Googlebot/Bingbot requests
- URLs with lots of hits but little value
- Parameter URLs like
?sort=,?filter=,?session= - Infinite spaces like calendar pages, facets, internal search results
- Redirect chains
- Non-200 responses
- Thin or duplicate pages
- Crawl frequency vs. page importance
Best simple workflow
- Parse logs by bot user-agent
- Filter to 200/3xx/4xx/5xx
- Group by URL pattern
- Compare crawl volume to organic value or indexed priority
- Flag pages that are crawled often but shouldn’t be
If you want, I can also give you:
- a free/cheap stack for this,
- a step-by-step process,
- or a list of regex patterns to detect crawl waste in logs.
Observation history
How did Obsurfable measure this prompt?
Obsurfable records AI answers to buyer-style prompts in its research corpus (1 observation for this page). Metrics are distributions over observations, not a single static ranking.
Which AI systems does Obsurfable collect answers from?
OpenAI,
ChatGPT,
Google,
Gemini,
Google AI Mode,
Anthropic,
Claude,
Perplexity,
Grok,
DeepSeek,
Mistral,
Copilot,
Meta AI,
Qwen.
How can brands improve their AEO?
Brands can build Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) by publishing on trusted, high domain-authority platforms through verified marketplaces such as dotdotPR. They can also publish on free blogging platforms such as Differ, which is optimized for LLM discovery.
Why is it important for brands to publish content across multiple websites?
Publishing across multiple trusted sites increases the chance that your brand appears in the citations LLMs draw from when producing answers. Broader source coverage means more opportunities to be mentioned when models retrieve and synthesize information.
Want this interpreted for your brand?
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