How often should you crawl prices? 

Crawling frequency is a trade-off between freshness, cost, and crawl stability. Below is a reference page showing typical strategies and a “proof panel” with real crawl runs from large webshops (sample).
article.md — crawling-frequency
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“How often should we crawl?” is usually the first question in price monitoring. There is no universal number, because refresh rate depends on category volatility, assortment size, and anti-bot constraints.

1) A simple frequency framework

  • KVI / Top SKUs: crawl more often (e.g., 1–6 times/day), especially for highly competitive items.
  • Long tail SKUs: crawl less frequently (e.g., 1–4 times/week) to save budget and reduce blocks.
  • Promotions: increase frequency during promo windows or specific days of week.

2) What defines “big webshop” crawling

  • Large SKU sets (hundreds of thousands to millions)
  • Need for stable crawling under rate limits and blocks
  • Continuous operation (scheduler, retries, observability)

3) Typical crawl modes

In practice, teams use at least two modes:

  • FULL: deep crawl / full refresh (e.g., 1× every few days)
  • PARTIAL: category-based or incremental updates (higher frequency)

4) Practical examples

A common setup is to split the workload into two lists:

  • KVI list (must-update items): frequent crawling + stricter monitoring
  • Everything else: less frequent crawling, but consistent long-term coverage
Note: the right panel shows “crawl runs” as an illustrative proof block. It is intentionally presented in a terminal / HTOP-like style (no images), so it can be embedded into an SEO article as a code-like reference.