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SEO Definition

Crawl Budget

The number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your website within a given timeframe.

Full definition

Crawl budget is the limit on how many pages Googlebot crawls on a site in a given period, determined by crawl rate limit (how often Googlebot crawls without overwhelming the server) and crawl demand (how popular and updated a site is). For small sites (under a few hundred pages), crawl budget is rarely a concern. For large sites with millions of pages, it matters significantly — low-value pages (filtered product pages, infinite scroll parameters, duplicate pages) can consume crawl budget that would be better spent on high-value content. Optimise crawl budget using robots.txt, canonical tags, noindex directives, and XML sitemaps.

Real-world example

A retailer with 500,000 product pages discovers Googlebot is spending 60% of crawl budget on out-of-stock URL variants. Adding noindex tags to these frees up budget for new product pages.

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