Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained

In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary and Martin dig into what "page size" and "page weight" actually mean for developers, users, and search engines.

They discuss exploding web page sizes: median mobile homepages hit 2.3 MB in 2025 Web Almanac (up 3x from 2015), key insights for developers on page weight definitions, Googlebot's crawl limits, HTML bloat from structured data/images, and why size still hurts UX on slow connections despite faster networks.

If you build or maintain websites, this conversation will help you rethink how much data your pages ship, where bloat really comes from, and why page weight still matters even as connections get faster.

Resources: ​Web Almanac → https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/ HTML living standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ How page speed helps with conversions → https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-data/

Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr106-transcript

Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral

Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team.

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Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes