Crawl Budget

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot (or other search engine crawlers) will visit on your website within a specific period. It is determined by two factors: crawl rate limit (how fast the crawler can go without overloading your server) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to crawl your site based on popularity and freshness). For most small-to-medium sites, crawl budget is not a concern. However, for large sites with millions of pages — e-commerce stores, news publishers, or user-generated content platforms — managing crawl budget is critical. Techniques include blocking unnecessary pages via robots.txt, fixing redirect chains, improving server response times, and ensuring internal linking guides crawlers to important pages.