What Is Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is the number of pages that a search engine bot, like Googlebot, will crawl on your website in a certain time period.
Think of it like a daily visit limit. The bot can only look at so many pages before it moves on to other sites.
Definition
Crawl budget is the mix of two things:
- Crawl rate limit How many requests the bot is willing to make to your server without overloading it.
- Crawl demand How important and popular your pages seem to the search engine, for example pages that change often or get traffic.
Together these decide how many of your URLs get crawled and how often.
Why Crawl Budget Matters
Crawl budget matters most for medium and large websites with many pages. If the bot does not crawl your important pages:
- New pages may not appear in search results.
- Updated content may stay outdated in search.
- Low value or broken pages might waste your crawl budget.
By using your crawl budget well you help search engines focus on your best and most useful pages.
How Crawl Budget Works
Search engines look at your site and decide:
- How fast your server responds.
- How often your content changes.
- How many quality links point to your pages.
- How many errors or redirects they hit.
If your site is fast and healthy they may crawl more pages. If your site is slow or full of errors they may crawl fewer pages to avoid causing problems.
Crawl Budget vs Related Terms
- Crawl budget vs indexing Crawl budget is about how many pages are visited. Indexing is about which of those crawled pages are stored and shown in search results.
- Crawl budget vs sitemap A sitemap is a list of URLs you give to search engines. Crawl budget is how many of those and other URLs they actually crawl.
- Crawl budget vs robots.txt Robots.txt tells bots which areas they can or cannot crawl. Crawl budget is how much they crawl within allowed areas.
Example of Crawl Budget
Imagine you have a store website with 200,000 product pages.
- Googlebot decides it will crawl about 10,000 URLs per day on your site.
- If many of those URLs are filters, endless calendar pages, or duplicate content, your important product pages might not be crawled often.
- If you block useless URLs, fix errors, and clean up duplicates, more of the 10,000 daily crawls go to important products. This is using your crawl budget well.
FAQs
Do small sites need to worry about crawl budget?
Most small sites with a few hundred or a few thousand pages do not need to worry much. Search engines can usually crawl all pages easily.
How can I improve crawl budget?
You can help by speeding up your site, fixing broken links and server errors, avoiding endless filter or search pages, using clear internal links, and submitting an XML sitemap.
Can I see my crawl budget?
You cannot see a simple crawl budget number, but tools like Google Search Console show crawl stats such as pages crawled per day, response times, and crawl errors.
Does blocking pages increase crawl budget?
Blocking low value areas, like endless filters, with robots.txt or noindex can reduce wasted crawls so bots focus more on your useful pages.
Does faster hosting help crawl budget?
Yes. If your server is fast and stable, search engines are more willing to crawl more pages because they see that your site can handle the load.
