Gary Illyes Warns: Faceted Navigation and Action Parameters are Strangling Google’s Crawl Efficiency!
Google discussed its 2025 year-end report on crawling and indexing challenges for Google Search. They revealed a comprehensive analysis of the hurdles faced throughout the year. The biggest issues identified were related to faceted navigation. Faceted navigation complicates the indexing process by creating multiple pathways through content. Various action factors also affect how search bots interact with web pages. Together, these two key aspects accounted for about 75% of the problems encountered in effectively crawling and indexing sites. This critical information comes from Google’s Gary Illyes, a prominent figure in the search team. He shared these insights on the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast. It was published this morning and provides valuable context for webmasters and SEO professionals looking to improve their sites.
What is the issue. Crawling issues can slow your site to a crawl, overload your server, and make your website unusable or inaccessible. If a bot gets stuck in an infinite crawling loop, recovery can take time.
- “Once it discovers a set of URLs, it can’t make a decision about whether that URL space is good. It can’t decide unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space,” Illyes said. By then it is too late and your site has slowed to a halt.
The biggest crawling challenges. Based on the report, these are the main issues Google sees:
- 50% come from faceted navigation. This is common on ecommerce sites, where endless filters for size, color, price, and similar options create near-infinite URL combinations.
- 25% come from action parameters. These are URL parameters that trigger actions instead of meaningfully changing page content.
- 10% come from irrelevant parameters. This includes session IDs, UTM tags, and other tracking parameters added to URLs.
- 5% come from plugins or widgets. Some plugins and widgets generate problematic URLs that confuse crawlers.
- 2% come from other “weird stuff.” This catch-all category includes issues such as double-encoded URLs and related edge cases.
Why you should care. A clean URL structure without bot traps is essential to keep your server healthy. It ensures fast page loads. It also prevents search engines from getting confused about your canonical URLs.
The episode. Crawling Challenges: What the 2025 Year-End Report Tells Us.
