What does crawl budget mean?

In SEO, the term crawl budget refers to the amount of time and resources that a search engine (typically Google) allocates to crawl and discover pages on a website within a specific timeframe.

The crawl budget is determined by two main factors:

• Crawl rate limit: how many requests a search engine can make to your website without overloading your servers. This is influenced by your site’s server speed and health.
• Crawl demand: how much Googlebot “wants” to crawl your content, which depends on factors such as site popularity, content quality, and how often the content is updated.

For most small or medium-sized sites, crawl budget isn’t usually a limiting factor. However, for large websites (such as those with thousands of pages), optimizing crawl budget ensures that search engines prioritize and index your most important pages rather than wasting resources on low-value or duplicate URLs.

Managing crawl budget effectively can improve how quickly new or updated content is discovered and indexed, which directly impacts organic visibility in search results