What Is Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your website within a given timeframe. Google allocates crawl resources based on your site's size, health, popularity, and server capacity. If Googlebot runs out of crawl budget before reaching all your important pages, those pages may not be indexed or updated.
Does Crawl Budget Matter for Your Site?
| Site Size | Crawl Budget Concern |
|---|---|
| Under 1,000 pages | Rarely an issue — Google can crawl the entire site easily |
| 1,000-10,000 pages | Can become an issue if many pages are low quality or duplicated |
| 10,000+ pages | Important to optimise — large sites often have crawl budget problems |
| E-commerce with filters | Filter combinations can create millions of URLs that waste budget |
How to Optimise Crawl Budget
- Fix broken links — 404 pages waste crawl budget
- Set canonical tags — consolidate duplicate URLs
- Block low-value pages — use robots.txt to block search results pages, filter combinations, and admin pages
- Improve internal linking — important pages should be easy to reach
- Submit a sitemap — helps Google prioritise important pages
- Improve page speed — faster pages = more pages crawled per visit
- Avoid redirect chains — check with the redirect checker
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Last updated: March 2026