Google Search Console’s “request a recrawl” tool inside the robots.txt report is throwing errors for multiple site owners. SEO consultant Jay Cooper reported on Bluesky Monday that the button fails “every time” across several properties, returning “Unknown error. Please wait a moment and try again.” instead of queuing the recrawl.
Google’s John Mueller replied that the feature worked fine on his own site. He followed up minutes later: “ah, I see the error on some of my other sites though. I’ll poke around.”
That reversal matters more than the bug itself. Mueller’s own inconsistent results confirm the failure is not tied to any single site’s configuration, permissions, or robots.txt syntax. This is a separate issue from the Googlebot-specific rule-group syntax story covered here yesterday; the two should not be conflated.
Google has not filed a status-dashboard entry for the outage. If your recrawl requests are failing right now, stop auditing your own setup and wait Mueller out.
Barry Schwartz reported the issue for Search Engine Roundtable on Monday, July 27, 2026.
