AbstractThis paper is concerned with the fractional Keller–Segel system in temporal and spatial variables. We consider fractional dissipation for the physical variables including a fractional dissipation mechanism for the chemotactic diffusion, as well as a time fractional variation assumed in the Caputo sense. We analyze the fractional heat semigroup obtaining time decay and integral estimates of the Mittag–Leffler operators in critical Besov spaces, and prove a bilinear estimate derived from the nonlinearity of the Keller–Segel system, without using auxiliary norms. We use these results in order to prove the existence of global solutions in critical homogeneous Besov spaces employing only the norm of the natural persistence space, including the existence of self-similar solutions, which constitutes a persistence result in this framework. In addition, we prove a uniqueness result without assuming any smallness condition on the initial data.