What Is Crawl Budget and why should you care?

Crawl budget is the amount of attention search engines are willing to give your site. It’s a combination of how many pages they want to crawl and how many they can crawl within a certain timeframe.

If you’ve got thousands of pages and Google only crawls a few hundred each day, you’ve got a problem. That problem is crawl budget.

This concept isn’t new, but the term “crawl budget” became popular when Google’s Webmaster Blog explained it more clearly back in 2017.  I think it was Gary Illyes, who first addressed it directly. It’s not something you can check in your Analytics, and Google Search Console won’t spell it out for you either. But it’s real. You’ll see it in your logs, and you’ll feel it when critical updates don’t get indexed.

Where it comes from

The term comes from technical SEO circles. It’s not officially documented in core web standards, but it reflects how Google and Bing allocate resources when crawling large websites. Google has openly said that smaller sites shouldn’t worry about it, but in practice, even sites with a few hundred URLs can suffer from crawl prioritisation issues if the site is messy or slow.

Crawl budget is mostly relevant when your site has a lot of pages, a lot of redirects, or a lot of technical debt. It’s influenced by how quickly your site responds, how often your content changes, how healthy your URLs are, and how your internal linking is structured.

Google’s view on Crawl Budget

Google splits crawl budget into two main ideas: crawl rate limit and crawl demand.

• Crawl rate limit is about server load. If your site responds slowly, Google backs off.

• Crawl demand is about what Google wants to crawl. If your content is stale or low value, Google does not waste time crawling it.

So it’s not just about fixing crawl errors. It’s about showing Google which parts of your site are valuable and making it easy for them to fetch and process those pages.

Fun fact – I have the UK trademark for Crawl Rate.

How to optimise for Crawl Budget

You can’t “set” a crawl budget, but you can influence how efficiently it gets spent. Here are some of the practical steps I take when working on large sites:

• Clean up low-value URLs – If they don’t need to be indexed, block or noindex them. This includes internal search pages, filters, or old paginated URLs.

• Fix broken links and redirects – Every redirect chain or broken link is a wasted crawl.

• Speed matters – The faster your site responds, the more URLs search engines can hit. That includes HTML, JS, and even CSS.

• Consolidate duplicates – Use canonical tags properly. Avoid near-identical pages that confuse bots.

• Tidy your sitemap – Only include URLs you actually want indexed. Keep it lean.

• Internal linking – Make sure crawlable paths exist to your important content. If it takes four clicks to reach a key page, fix that.

What about Bing?

Yes, Bing has a crawl budget too, though it’s far less documented. You’ll see crawl patterns through Bing Webmaster Tools, and they do respect sitemaps and robots directives just like Google. Bing also looks at server performance and site structure to determine how much crawling to allocate.

You should care about where crawl resources are going

Crawl budget isn’t something you tweak from a settings panel. It’s a byproduct of how well your site is built, how fast it responds, and how clearly it tells search engines what matters. When you fix the junk, focus on your core content, and keep your site fast and tidy, crawl budget takes care of itself. If you suspect that you have an issue with Googlebot wasting your crawl budget, feel free to get in touch. I’ll happily take a look for you.