Google’s Search Relations team disclosed a rarely documented detail about crawler behavior. Gary Illyes said on LinkedIn that Googlebot issues HTTP methods beyond the standard GET and POST fetches, including HEAD and OPTIONS requests, plus PUT, PATCH and DELETE calls.
Illyes said those five methods combined make up under 1.5 percent of everything Google’s crawlers request across the web. He attributed the pattern to JavaScript execution during rendering, noting that scripts running on a page can trigger those calls once Googlebot processes them.
The disclosure followed a run of questions Illyes said he had fielded over recent weeks about whether Google’s bots ever move past standard fetch requests. His answer confirms they do, just rarely, and the mechanism is rendering, not some hidden crawl behavior.
For site owners scanning access logs, a stray PUT, PATCH or DELETE line tied to a Google user agent is not evidence of scraping abuse or a compromised account. It more likely reflects JavaScript on the page firing that call during rendering, and the volume is too small to justify blocking those methods.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the LinkedIn post between August 7 and August 9, 2026.
