How many pages a search engine will crawl on your site, and how often.
Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot is willing and able to fetch from your site in a given period. It is a product of two things: crawl capacity (how fast your server responds without being overloaded) and crawl demand (how much Google wants your pages, driven by popularity and freshness).
For most small and mid-size sites it is not a concern. It becomes real for large sites (tens of thousands of URLs and up), sites with heavy faceted navigation, or sites generating many low-value URLs that waste crawls before important pages are reached.
If Google spends its budget crawling parameter URLs, filtered listings, or duplicate pages, your genuinely important content gets crawled and refreshed more slowly. That delays indexing of new pages and updates to existing ones.
The goal is to point crawlers at what matters and away from what does not.
Common questions
Straight answers on how this fits your marketing and build.
Almost never. If your site has a few thousand clean URLs and responds quickly, Google will crawl everything it needs. Crawl budget matters at scale or when a site generates large volumes of junk URLs.
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