What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is the amount of attention search engine bots, like Googlebot, are willing and able to spend crawling your website in a given time. It determines how many URLs get crawled and how often they are revisited.

For growing B2B and e‑commerce sites, crawl budget directly affects how fast new pages are discovered and how reliably changes are picked up. If your crawl budget is wasted on low value or technical junk pages, important product, category or lead gen pages may be crawled less often or not at all.

How crawl budget works in practice

Crawl budget is mainly driven by two ideas. First, crawl capacity, which is how many requests a search engine is comfortable sending to your server without slowing it down. Second, crawl demand, which is how interesting your content looks to the search engine based on popularity, internal links and freshness.

When both are high, search engines crawl more of your site more frequently. When capacity is limited, or demand is low, your crawl budget shrinks and fewer URLs get regular attention. This is why technical SEO, crawlability and indexability all work together with crawl budget.

Why crawl budget matters for SEO performance

On a small brochure site with a few pages, crawl budget rarely blocks growth. On larger B2B platforms, content hubs or e‑commerce stores with thousands of URLs, it becomes a real constraint. Search engines may waste crawl budget on filtered URLs, faceted navigation, tracking parameters or outdated content.

For growth minded teams, managing crawl budget is about aligning what gets crawled with what drives revenue. You want search engines to spend their time on high intent pages, not endless combinations of filters or thin content.

Key ways to optimise your crawl budget

  • Clean up unnecessary URLs by using proper redirects, canonical tags and parameter rules so bots do not waste crawl budget.
  • Improve internal linking so important pages are closer to the homepage and more likely to be crawled often.
  • Fix repeated 404s and server errors that force bots to use crawl budget on broken pages.
  • Improve site speed and stability so search engines are comfortable crawling more aggressively.
  • Use log file analysis or tools like the 6th Man SEO extension to spot crawl waste and orphaned pages.

These actions help concentrate crawl budget on pages that actually matter, which supports faster indexing and stronger visibility for core keywords.

How to know if crawl budget is a problem

Most teams first notice crawl budget issues when new pages take weeks to appear in search results or old URLs stay visible long after removal. In Google Search Console, you may see many discovered URLs that are not crawled regularly, or a high volume of crawl requests to parameterised and low value pages.

If you are scaling content production or running a large webshop, reviewing crawl budget should be part of your wider SEO strategy. An experienced team can audit your technical setup, restructure internal links and reduce crawl waste so search engines focus on the URLs that drive leads and sales.