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Term

Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot crawls on a website within a given time frame — determined by server load and the perceived popularity of the content.

Crawl budget — explained in more detail

Crawl budget combines two components: the crawl-rate limit (how many requests Googlebot is willing to send the server, derived from response times and error rates) and crawl demand (how worthwhile Google considers re-fetching the content — driven by popularity and change frequency). Together they determine how many URLs Googlebot actually fetches per time window on a given site.

Example / context

Crawl budget only becomes a concern on large sites — a rough rule of thumb is from roughly 10,000 URLs upwards, or sites with very frequent updates (news, large shops with dynamic filters). For most small and mid-sized sites the budget is effectively unlimited; new or changed content is crawled in good time without any tuning. If you do want to optimize: reduce duplicate content, block parameterized URLs in robots.txt, maintain clear internal linking, keep server response times fast.

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