Google crawls a page as often as it judges the page to be important and likely to change, so pages with strong links, regular freshness, and demonstrated value get re-visited frequently, while orphaned, stale, or low-value pages get crawled rarely or effectively never. Crawl frequency is not random and it is not a fixed schedule applied uniformly. It functions as a running vote on each page’s importance, cast continuously from the signals Google observes, and you can watch this behavior in crawl logs and coverage reports.
The drivers of a high crawl rate cluster around importance and change. A page that many other pages link to, internally and externally, reads as significant, so Google returns to keep its copy current. A page that updates often, or sits in a section that updates often, trains the crawler to expect change and to come back looking for it. A page that earns traffic and engagement signals that it has real value worth keeping fresh in the index. These signals compound, and a page that has them tends to be crawled on a short cycle.
The drivers of a near-zero crawl rate are the mirror image. An orphaned page that nothing links to is hard to reach and easy to deprioritize, because the crawler has no strong path to it and no signal that it matters. A page that has not changed in years teaches the crawler that returning is wasted effort. A page that draws no traffic and carries thin or duplicative content offers little reason to revisit. Such a page may be crawled once and then left alone for a very long time, sometimes long enough that it feels like never.
Read together, these patterns mean crawl rate is downstream of perceived importance. Google is not deciding at random which pages to neglect; it is allocating its attention toward what its signals say is valuable and changing, and away from what looks abandoned or inert. The gap between daily and never is the gap between a page that looks important and one that does not.
If a page you care about is being crawled rarely, raise the signals that drive importance: link to it from pages that already get crawled often, refresh its content meaningfully, and make sure it is genuinely worth a reader’s time. Earn the crawl by looking important to the crawler, because that is the only vote it is counting.