Verified Confidence: high
Primary source found; it says the same thing, the scope matches, and it is reasonably current.
Safe rephrasing
Google's current documentation says Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of each supported file for Search (64MB for PDFs), not the 15MB often quoted from its 2022 docs.
What the source says
When crawling for Google Search, Googlebot crawls the first 2MB of a supported file type , and the first 64MB of a PDF file.
Google Search Central — Googlebot (crawler documentation)
- Commonly cited as
- "How much of a page does Googlebot read?"
- True origin
- Google Search Central — Googlebot (crawler documentation)
- Type
- Reference fact: A frequently needed number or rule taken directly from a primary source (e.g. Pew, Census, IAB/PwC, FTC), with its as-of date.
- Year
- Current documentation
- Data as of
- Documentation read on 2026-10-17
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- Official Google documentation (current version read Oct. 17, 2026).
- Drift between quote and source
- The widely repeated 15MB figure comes from Google's 2022 documentation and blog post; the current page gives 2MB for Search
- Each referenced resource (CSS, JavaScript) is fetched separately under the same limit
- Interest
- Google operates Google Search and documents its own systems.