Direct answer
Logs can show which verified agents requested which URLs and how the server responded; they cannot show every crawl decision, rendered result or index state.
Practical steps
- Define retention and privacy boundaries.
- Verify bot identity where needed.
- Normalize URL and status dimensions.
- Compare important templates, wasted paths and response health.
Common mistakes
- Trusting user-agent strings alone.
- Logging sensitive query values.
- Equating requests with indexing.
Limitations
- CDNs and sampling can omit events.
- Bot verification and retention add operational cost.
Primary sources
- Understand the JavaScript SEO basics — Google Search Central; 2026-03-04; 2026-08-14.