Backlink crawl timing tracker
You keep a manual backlink log, so you already hold the two dates that matter for every link, the day you discovered it and the day Google first crawled it. This tracker reads that log, works out the gap between the two dates for each link, and shows you the median gap across the whole batch. It answers one question. Is a link sitting discovered but uncrawled for too long.
The honest limit, stated first. This tool compares dates you supply. It cannot crawl anything and does not know whether a URL is in the index, because no public endpoint reports that. It is a calculator over your own log, and it is only as current as the dates you paste in. The value is the shape it puts on data you already own.
Paste your dates
One line per link. Use a pipe between the three fields, in this order.
One per line, three fields separated by a pipe. Field one is the URL, field two is the date you discovered the link, and field three is the date it first crawled. The crawl date is optional, so you can log new finds before Google gets to them. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD. Up to 100 lines per run.
Why the discovery-to-crawl gap is the number worth watching
The crawl date alone is easy to read as good news. Google reached the page, so the link must be working. But a single crawl date hides the most useful part of the story, which is how long the page sat discovered before Google decided to crawl it. That delay is the only part of the timing you can influence, so it is the part worth tracking.
Think about it as two clocks that start at different moments. The first clock starts when you place the link, and the seller's domain does whatever it does next. On our ledger the median link is discovered around day 4 after placement. The second clock starts at that discovery, and it is the crawl engine's turn. That engine reads internal links, sitemaps and crawl budget, and on our ledger the crawl that follows a discovered link arrives a median of 11 days later, putting a fully crawled link near the two week mark. Subtract the two and the discovery-to-crawl gap is typically a week or so.
A short gap means the domain is responding to new content. A long gap on one link means that page is stuck in the queue, and it will sit there until something points crawl budget at it. That is the signal to act on, by adding an internal link, resubmitting the URL or nudging the sitemap. The tracker below exists to surface exactly that outlier. For the fuller picture of what a normal timeline looks like, see how long backlinks take to index, and to turn dates into an estimate for a single URL, use the backlink index ETA calculator.
How to read the median
The summary line reports the median days-to-crawl across rows that have a crawl date. The median is the middle value of the sorted list, so it shrugs off one or two extreme outliers that would skew a simple average. Use it as a baseline for this batch of links, then compare each row against it.
- A link at or under the median is behaving normally for this log.
- A link well above the median, especially one still showing WAITING with no crawl date, is the one worth chasing.
- A row marked INVALID is a date you wrote in a format the tool could not parse, or a URL field that was empty. Fix the line and rerun rather than trusting a wrong number.
Remember the caveat that runs through every page here. A log of your own observations stays only as fresh as the dates you add. Keep filling the crawl date in as URL inspection reports it, and the median stays honest.
Questions
Why track the discovery-to-crawl gap instead of the crawl date alone?
The crawl date only tells you when Google finally got to the page. The gap tells you how fast the crawl engine responds to a link that already sits on a live page. That is the part you can influence with internal links, sitemaps and crawl budget, so it is the number worth watching.
What is a normal discovery-to-crawl gap for a bought link?
On our ledger the median link is discovered around day 4 after placement and the crawl that follows arrives a median of 11 days later, so a gap of a week and a half or so is unremarkable. What you want to catch is the outlier, the link that sits discovered for three weeks or more without a crawl, because that is the one stuck in the queue.
Is this tool sending my dates anywhere?
No. The tracker's script runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing, so your dates never leave the page. Your paste is read once, computed, and left on the page. Close the tab and it is gone.
Why does a row show WAITING and never a crawl date?
A WAITING row means you did not enter a first-crawled date, so the tracker has no crawl to measure. It counts toward days-to-discovery, shows the gap as open, and is left out of the median until you add the crawl date. Fill it in when the crawl shows up in URL inspection.