Google's John Mueller was asked if a spike in crawler activity would be a sign that the helpful content update is rolling out. John said no, as expected because he said no to this question numerous times on previous updates.
Here are the relevant set of tweets I am referencing here:
No
— 🖖 johnmu (personal), logically 🖖 (@JohnMu) September 5, 2022
Now, Google has said "large crawl rate increases is not related to algorithm updates, although, sometimes it might be - maybe." Those referenced past times I covered Google's statements on crawl spikes and how they are unrelated to algorithm updates. But earlier this year, John Mueller double down and said no, crawl spikes are unrelated to algorithm updates.
Forum discussion at Twitter.