What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on a website within a specific timeframe. Search engines allocate limited resources across billions of websites, so they assign each site a crawl budget based on server capacity and content demand. Optimizing your crawl budget ensures search engines discover and index important pages quickly rather than wasting resources on low-value URLs.

Crawl budget represents the maximum number of URLs a web crawler will visit on your site during a given period. Search engines determine this by balancing server capacity with content demand. When your site’s budget is exhausted, crawlers move to other websites, leaving remaining pages for the next cycle.

This primarily affects large sites with thousands of pages, frequent content updates, or complex architectures where inefficient crawling prevents important pages from being indexed.

Crawl capacity limit determines the maximum crawling speed your server can sustain. If your site responds quickly to crawler requests, the capacity limit increases, allowing more pages to be crawled. Server errors, timeouts, and slow response times reduce this limit as search engines throttle requests to avoid overloading struggling servers.

Crawl demand reflects how often search engines want to revisit your content. Popular pages with many backlinks and high traffic receive higher crawl demand. Frequently updated content like news articles gets crawled more often than static pages. The combination of capacity limit and demand determines your effective crawl budget.

Duplicate content forces crawlers to process multiple versions of the same information without adding value. Redirect chains waste time following multiple hops between URLs. Broken links send crawlers to non-existent pages returning 404 errors.

URL parameters from filters create thousands of duplicate URLs cluttering the URL frontier. Poor internal linking buries important pages deep in site architecture. Including non-indexable pages in sitemaps misleads crawlers about priority content.

Improve server response times to increase crawl capacity. Faster page loads allow crawlers to visit more URLs in the same timeframe. Block unimportant pages in robots.txt to prevent budget waste on admin pages or search results.

Keep sitemaps clean by including only indexable pages. Fix redirect chains by updating links to point directly to final destinations. Strengthen internal linking to important pages, ensuring crawlers easily discover and prioritize your best content.

Most small websites under 10,000 pages don’t need to worry about crawl budget. Search engines efficiently crawl and index well-structured small sites. Crawl budget becomes critical for large ecommerce sites with hundreds of thousands of product pages, news publishers adding dozens of articles daily, or sites experiencing rapid growth.

Technical issues compound budget problems on large sites. If you notice important pages taking weeks to get indexed or seeing low index coverage relative to total pages, crawl budget optimization should become a priority.

Crawl budget limits how many pages search engines crawl on your site within a set timeframe, determined by server capacity and content demand. Common budget wasters include duplicate content, redirect chains, broken links, and poor site architecture. Optimization strategies focus on improving response times, blocking low-value pages, cleaning sitemaps, and strengthening internal linking to priority content. While small sites rarely face budget constraints, large or rapidly growing sites must actively manage crawl efficiency to ensure comprehensive indexing of important pages.