Google Files Bugs Against WordPress Plugins for Crawl Waste

Google's crawl team has taken direct action against WordPress plugin developers whose products are causing significant crawl budget waste. This proactive approach involves filing bug reports against plugins that generate excessive URL parameters, a major source of inefficiency for Googlebot. Gary Illyes, a prominent Analyst at Google, recently shared details of these efforts, highlighting how WooCommerce swiftly addressed an issue while other developers have been less responsive.

What Google's Crawl Report Revealed

The insights come from Google’s internal year-end crawl issue report, which Illyes discussed on the Search Off the Record podcast with fellow Google Search Relations team member Martin Splitt. The report identified action parameters as a significant contributor to crawl issues, accounting for approximately 25% of all problems flagged in 2025. Only faceted navigation ranked higher, at 50%. Together, these two categories represented roughly three-quarters of all crawl issues Google identified last year.

The core problem with action parameters lies in their ability to create what appear to be new, unique URLs by appending strings like ?add_to_cart=true. These parameters can stack, effectively doubling or even tripling the crawlable URL space on a website. Illyes noted that these parameters are frequently injected by CMS plugins rather than intentionally implemented by site owners.

WooCommerce Addresses Crawl Waste Quickly

Google’s crawl team specifically filed a bug report against the popular WooCommerce plugin, flagging its add-to-cart parameter behavior as a widespread source of crawl waste. Illyes explained their identification process:

“So we would try to dig into like where are these coming from and then sometimes you can identify that perhaps these action parameters are coming from WordPress plug-ins because WordPress is quite a popular CMS content management system. And then you would find that yes, these plugins are the ones that add to cart and add to wish list.”

“And then what you would do if you were a Gary is to try to see if they are open source in the sense that they have a repository where you can report bugs and issues and in both of these cases the answer was yes. So we would file issues against these plugins.”

WooCommerce promptly responded and implemented a fix. Illyes praised their rapid turnaround, stating, “What I really, really loved is that the good folks at WooCommerce almost immediately picked up the issue and they solved it.” However, he noted that other plugin developers with similar issues have not yet responded, though he did not name them.

The Broader Impact on Crawl Budget and SEO

This persistent issue with URL parameters is not new. Illyes has previously warned about these problems and continued to flag them. Google subsequently formalized its faceted navigation guidelines into official documentation and revised its URL parameter best practices. Despite these efforts, the data indicates that these warnings and documentation updates haven't fully resolved the problem, as these same issues continue to dominate crawl reports.

Often, crawl waste is deeply embedded within the plugin layer, creating a significant challenge for websites, especially those relying on e-commerce plugins. While the root cause of crawl problems might not originate with the site owner, managing them remains their responsibility.

Illyes explained that Googlebot cannot determine the usefulness of a URL space “unless it crawled a large chunk of that URL space.” By the time a website owner notices server strain, the damage to crawl budget and server resources is already underway. Google consistently recommends using robots.txt to proactively block parameter URLs, emphasizing that this approach is far more effective than waiting for symptoms to appear.

Google's Proactive Stance

Google’s strategy of directly filing bugs against open-source plugins holds promise for significantly reducing crawl waste at its source, benefiting the entire web ecosystem. The full podcast episode featuring Illyes and Splitt, including a transcript, is available for listening.