Definition
Crawl budget is the combination of two factors: crawl capacity (crawl rate limit -- the number of requests Googlebot can make without overloading the server) and crawl demand (how often Google wants to re-explore pages based on their popularity and freshness). For small sites (fewer than a few thousand pages), crawl budget is generally not an issue. It becomes critical for large sites (e-commerce, media, directories) where thousands of pages can waste budget: filtered pages, duplicates, URL parameters, low-quality pages. Optimizing crawl budget means blocking crawling of useless pages and facilitating access to important ones.
Key Points
- Critical mainly for sites with 10,000+ pages
- Wasting crawl budget delays indexation of important pages
- Duplicate, parameterized, and low-quality pages consume budget unnecessarily
Practical Examples
E-commerce and filters
An e-commerce site with 100,000 products and sorting filters generates 5 million URL combinations. Without crawl budget management (noindex, robots.txt, canonical), Google wastes time on useless pages.
Crawl budget optimization
By blocking filter pages in robots.txt and cleaning up parameterized URLs, a site reduces its crawlable pages from 500,000 to 50,000. Google now explores important pages more frequently.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, for sites with fewer than a few thousand pages, crawl budget is generally not an issue. Google has enough capacity to explore the entire site. It becomes a concern for sites with 10,000+ pages.
Check exploration statistics in Google Search Console. If important pages are not crawled regularly or if the number of explored pages plateaus while you publish new content, you may have a crawl budget issue.
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Last updated: 2026-02-07