Your guide to crawl budget optimization

Author: Yossi Fest

If you’ve been in the SEO world for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard the term crawl budget. You’ve also likely come across the paradox: for some websites, it's critical to success; while for others, it’s almost irrelevant. Crawl budget is one of the many concepts where if you ask an SEO whether you should spend time optimizing for it, the most honest answer you’ll get is “it depends.”

The reality  is that for the vast majority of websites, crawl budget isn't something you need to worry about. But if you’re dealing with a large site—one with deep taxonomy, tens of thousands of URLs, or frequent content updates—neglecting crawl budget optimization could be quietly holding back your page indexation, visibility, and traffic.  SEO is constantly changing, but crawl budget remains one of the core factors that decides how effectively Google discovers, revisits, and serves your site.

In this guide, I’ll break down what crawl budget is, why it matters for some sites but not others, how to figure out if you have a problem, and the strategies and activities that have the biggest impact.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget refers to Google’s allotted time and willingness within a given time period that it will spend crawling your website. It’s the balance between what your site technically presents and allows to be crawled, and Google’s perceived value of your content. Two main factors drive crawl budget:

Crawl capacity

Crawl capacity is about how many requests Google can make without putting too much strain on your servers. If your site responds quickly, serves lightweight pages, and handles multiple requests smoothly, Google will usually crawl more aggressively.

But there’s another side to this. Google doesn’t have infinite capacity for crawling. It still needs to prioritize crawling across the entire web, which means there's always a ceiling on how much attention your site can get—no matter how optimized it is.

Crawl demand

This is Google’s way of deciding which URLs are worth its attention and how often they should be refreshed. The biggest factors that influence crawl demand are:

• Perceived inventory. By default, Googlebot will try to crawl every URL it can find on your site. This is where smart optimization comes in: guiding Google toward your most valuable content and keeping it away from the junk. 
  

• Popularity. Pages that earn more backlinks, have higher engagement signals, and/or that generate more consistent traffic tend to get crawled more often. Google assumes popular URLs are more valuable and tries to keep them fresh in its index.
  

• Freshness. If you refresh your content, Google will revisit it more often to make sure it has the latest version. On the flip side, pages that rarely change naturally get crawled less frequently. 

When crawl budget matters (and when it dosen’t)

As pointed out earlier, the reality is that most sites don’t and will never have a crawl budget problem. Googlebot is smart, efficient, and (mostly) capable of finding your content and keeping up with its changes if your site is small, clean, and simple. 

But once you start stacking 10’s of thousands of URLs, faceted navigation, and parameterized URLs-galore, everything changes. This is when crawl inefficiency starts bleeding into indexing speed, organic rankings, and visibility. 

You don’t need to worry if:

• You’ve got fewer than ~10k URLs

• Your site structure is clean and relatively flat

• Your pages rarely change 

• You’re not seeing  indexing delays for new content

You do need to care if:

• You run a very large site: If you’re a publisher, large eCommerce site, or store, crawl budget matters. When you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pages, or even millions of pages, small inefficiencies compound fast. News articles that should be indexed instantly miss critical visibility windows. Seasonal product launches get delayed. Evergreen content refreshes lag behind competitors

• You’ve got faceted navigation, filters, parameters or dynamic URLs. Think eCommerce, marketplaces, travel sites. Every filter combo, sort order and view mode creates another URL.

  
  

• New content takes forever to index. No one expects instant indexation, but if you’re publishing fresh content and it takes weeks to show up in Google, there’s a good chance that Googlebot is not prioritizing discovery of new URLs. 

  
  

• From a spot-check in GSC’s Crawl Stats section, it looks messy. You see huge spikes in crawl requests, high numbers of 4XX and / or 5XX errors, and discovery dominated by everything except for HTML 200 status code pages. And you don’t recognize most of the URL paths and slug examples.

If you’ve found yourself in the latter group and think you may have a problem, don’t panic. Crawl budget is an SEO issue that is easy to fix most of the time, once you know what’s going on. Between Google Search Console, log files, and smart architecture tweaks, you can take back control and make sure Googlebot spends its time where it actually matters. 

How to diagnose  crawl budget issues

To find out if you truly have crawl budget issues or crawl inefficiencies, there are two key tools for the job: 

1. Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report. This is great for spotting patterns and big picture trends.

   
   

2. Server log file analysis. This is the real source of truth for exactly what’s being crawled. 

Step 1: Start with GSC’s crawl stats report

Where to find it: In Google Search Console, go to Settings > Crawl Stats.

This report helps you spot crawl trends, identify inefficiencies, and understand whether Googlebot’s priorities align with yours. 

At the top, you’ll see a box with line graphs displaying total crawl requests, total download size, and average response time.

What to look for:

• Sudden spikes: Google’s possibly overcrawling duplicate or low-value pages.

• Drops: Google might be losing interest or throttling your crawl rate.

Host status

If Googlebot’s is exceeding the acceptable fail rate for any of the three metrics (robots.txt fetch, DNS resolution, and server connectivity), your crawl capacity is compromised. This means that Google will crawl your pages less. 

Crawl requests breakdown

• By response: Make sure OK (200) dominates. Some redirects (3XX-level), as well as a small number of 4XX client errors and 5XX server errors are perfectly normal and expected—but they should never top the table. 

  
  

• By file type: HTML should be the top file type crawled. If CSS, JS, or JSON files dominate, your core content is competing for crawl attention. 

  
  

• By Googlebot type: On most sites, Googlebot Smartphone should lead. If desktop or other bot types dominate, this is a calling to double-check your mobile setup.

Crawl purpose

Look at discovery vs. refresh. It's normal to see lots of "refresh" crawl requests, so don't worry about that. However, you might have a crawl budget problem if you're putting out a lot of new content or have just performed a migration (involving new or changed URLs), and yet "discovery" isn't showing those updates.

GSC limitations you need to know

Before you treat this report as gospel, it’s important to keep the following limitations in mind:

• Sampled data: Individual URLs shown are just examples, not the full picture

• Limited history: Only covers a three month window

• Charts vs examples: Totals in charts are accurate, but don’t assume the examples represent all activity

  
  

Use GSC to spot patterns, not diagnose root causes. For that, you need your server logs. 

Step 2: Analyze log files

GSC gives you trends. Logs give you facts. Your server log files show every crawl event: which URLs Google hits, when, how often, and what status codes it encounters. If you want to understand crawl budget at scale, this is where the answers live. 

How to analyze your logs

Regardless of whichever of the following methods you use, you will need to obtain server logs from your website. In some platforms, content management systems, and/or plugins, you’ll be able to find these pretty easy. If you can’t, simply ask your developer or webmaster to export website logs. Either Apache or NGINX are fine.

If you’re using Wix, simply open your dashboard, head to Analytics > All Reports, and find the Bot visit / traffic reports under SEO Reports. There, you'll be able to analyze your log data  (including AI crawlers) for up to the last two years. 

Option A: Use a tool

There are log file analysis tools out there to make this easier, such as Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer. Simply upload your log files and let the tool do the work for you by showing you your data in prebuilt views.

Option B: DIY

Simply upload your CSV into an LLM for analysis, or plot out the data yourself in Excel. You'll need to format your columns for consistency, filter for various bots / user agents, and verify IPs (instructions below) to make sure they are the official bots, and not spoofed ones. Once your data is formatted and organized, you can analyze patterns with line charts, pivot tables, etc.

What to focus on in your analysis

Firstly, always confirm Googlebot via user agent. Google’s confirmed crawlers can be found here, and their IP addresses are here. To simplify this process, just make sure the IP address contains %66.249%, as this is the predominant IP address Google uses. You can do this in a similar fashion for all other common web crawlers.

1. Crawl frequency: Are your high-value URLs crawled often, or ignored?

   
   

2. Wasted requests: Are search pages, infinite filters, or faceted URLs hogging crawl budget?

   
   

3. Valuable pages missed: Are products, landing pages, or content hubs being skipped entirely?

   
   

4. 5XX errors: Server errors kill crawl efficiency

   
   

5. Site section analysis: Segment by URL / subfolder to see patterns of where Googlebot is spending time

   
   

6. New content crawling: Check how fast new content gets crawled.

   1. Pro tip: Pair log data with organic traffic to measure time-to-first visit vs. time-to-index

      
      

7. Status code stability: Spikes in 3XX, 4XX, or 5XX often point to structural or infrastructure issues

Segmenting your analysis

Look for issues by combining insights from GSC and logs to uncover crawl inefficiencies. 

• Overcrawled: Are search pages, filters,  paginated, or parameterized pages dominating crawl requests?

  
  

• Undercrawled: Are key site sections or money pages visited less than less-important sections?

  
  

• Misaligned priorities: Is Googlebot fetching images, CSS, JS, or API endpoints more than actual HTML content?

This is where you find out whether Googlebot’s working for you or against you. If you see low discovery, wasted requests, skipped important sections, or persistent errors, it’s likely that you've got a crawl budget problem.

How to optimize your site’s crawl budget

Optimizing your crawl budget is a strategy, not a hack. And it’s not something you manipulate, it’s something you manage. Googlebot has limits. The good news is that there are a number of actions you can take to improve crawl efficiency and make sure Google focuses where it matters most. 

These optimizations can be categorized at a high level into three key groups:

1. Controlling what Google crawls: Manually controlling which URLs does and doesn't crawl.

2. Guiding Google to the right pages: Helping Google find your most important content faster

3. Making every crawl request count: Squeezing more out of every crawl Googlebot gives you

01. Controlling what Google crawls

The first and arguably most important step is to make sure Google doesn't waste its time on URLs that it does not need to crawl, and to make sure that Google is to make sure Google can access all URLs it should be crawling. 

Optimize your robots.txt

Your robots.txt file lets you control which URLs bots can crawl. Use it to block URLs that don't need to be crawled. 

• Faceted  / Parameterized / Sort  URLS

  
  

These pages are especially prevalent on eCommerce websites, marketplaces, and information libraries. Example: https://www.example.com/shoes

Based on potential filtering on this page, it could generate dozens of URL variations that Googlebot does not need to crawl. 

Example: https://www.example.com/shoes?color=blue&size=9&sort=price

We’d want to block the following:

Disallow: /*color=

Disallow: /*size=

Disallow: /*sort=

Internal search results pages

Depending on your SEO strategy, internal search results pages often have no unique value, and there can be an infinite number of these URLs generated (ie. a user can search endlessly).

• Staging, development, and demo environments

• Session IDs, tracking, and affiliate parameters

• User-specific or non-public content

• Auto-generated / UGC pages

• Duplicate pages for marketing campaigns

• API endpoints, JSON, and other non-HTML responses

Caution: Be careful when blocking resources in robots.txt file. Blocking essential files like API endpoints needed to load content can prevent Google from rendering your pages correctly. Always test changes to ensure you’re not blocking anything required for page rendering.

Speed up your site

If your pages are slow to respond, Googlebot will crawl less often, crawl fewer pages, and deprioritize your site in favor of faster alternatives to spend its resources on. This isn’t speculation. Google has explicitly confirmed this in their crawl documentation:

“If the site responds quickly for a while, the limit goes up, meaning more connections can be used to crawl. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less.”

That’s why this action sits in this category. Site speed has a direct impact on crawl rates, and a faster site gives you more control over how much Google crawls.

If you’re using Wix, the platform is built for performance. Wix serves content through a globally distributed CDN, automatically compresses and converts images to next-gen formats, lazy loads media, prefetches critical resources, and continuously optimizes JavaScript execution. Just remember to follow the best practices to keep your site performing at its best.

Crawl budget isn’t just about how many URLs Google wants to crawl, it's also about how your site can handle the requests. If your site consistently returns fast response times, Googlebot increases your crawl rate limit as it sees it’s effective / can keep up. If your site struggles, overloads your servers, or results in spikes of errors, Googlebot slows down crawling in order to avoid crashing your site. Some key tactics to improve your site speed:

• Reducing server response times

  • Upgrading your hosting

  • Using a CDN

  • Ensuring you have an effective caching setup 

• Optimizing assets 

  • Compressing and minifying CSS and JS

  • Serving images in modern formats such as webp or avif

  • Lazy loading all non-critical media

Make sure links are crawlable

Googlebot follows links to discover pages, but only if it can see them. If your links are hidden behind Javascript or lazy-loaded after interaction, Google may never find them; Google is spending none of its available budget on those pages. If Google can’t find the path, it won’t crawl the destination.

• Always use clean <a> tags that render server-side to make sure they are in the HTML on initial page load. 

  
  

• Avoid lazy-loading navigation or critical content

  • Bad: a ‘load more’ button that injects products via JS only when clicked

  • Good: Paginated URLs that are visible to crawlers

Offload resources to a CDN or subdomain

Hosting resources like images, videos, pdfs, and JS bundles on a separate hostname or CDN preserves crawl budget for your main HTML pages. Google has explicitly confirmed that crawl budget is managed at the host level, not across an entire domain or brand. By serving static files (images, scripts, CSS) from a separate hostname, whether that’s a CDN or your own subdomain, you effectively separate their crawl demand. This prevents unnecessary strain on the crawl allocation for your primary content.

• Example: Google continuously crawling heavy video files that rarely change. The result of this change is that Googlebot can skip heavy resources and spend its time on high-value pages.

  
  

  • Before: https://www.example.com/assets/hero-video.mp4

  • After: https://cdn.example.com/hero-video.mp4

02. Guiding Google to the right pages

Once you’ve directly limited what Googlebot is wasting it’s crawling on, and made sure all important pages can be accessed, the next set of actions should be to help Googlebot find and prioritize your best content.

Keep your XML sitemap lean and focused

Think of your XML sitemap as Google’s best friend for understanding your site’s pages and overall structure. It should include only the pages you want indexed and exclude everything else.

Best practices:

• Include only canonical, indexable, high-value pages

• Remove expired products, outdated offers, and low-priority URLs

• Make sure it is kept up-to-date

Build strong internal linking structure

At surface level, internal linking might just seem like a simple way to guide users to related pages, but it plays a much larger role. It’s one of the most powerful ways Google discovers, prioritizes, and revisits your content. 

Without strong internal links, pages risk becoming orphaned and ignored since Googlebot relies on links to find them. A strong internal linking structure requires deep strategy, but the below are the starting points:

• Link from high-authority sections. Add links from your homepage, category pages, or top performing blog posts to priority URLs / site sections

  
  

• Ensure that all valuable pages are within 2-3 clicks of the homepage. User breadcrumbs, related products, and content hubs 

03. Make every crawl request count

Even with controls and guidance in place, Googlebot’s efficiency will still not be at its peak if Googlebot keeps hitting roadblocks. These optimizations help to ensure that every request works toward your goal. 

Clean up low-value content

If you have pages that are filled with thin content, placeholders, low effort copy, or even blank pages (soft 404s), this is problematic for multiple reasons: 

• Google is spending time on these, rather than on higher-quality pages that provide actual value to users.

• High value pages get revisited more often.

• Your site’s ‘reputation’ improves. A site (predominantly) composed of strong, valuable page signals quality to Google, which can help ‘persuade’ it to spend more resources crawling it. Conversely, a site containing mostly mediocre pages that don’t have user-value do NOT signal quality to Google. 

There are two courses of action here: technical and content-related:

1. Conduct a technical audit of what can be cleaned up through de-duplication, blocking in robots.txt, fixing soft 404s, and so on.

   
   

2. If the page really is needed and has the potential to be more valuable to users, work on increasing the page’s content to elevate it to a level where Google would deem the page as more valuable.

The most important thing is to ensure that every single page on your website has a clear purpose.

Fix redirect problems

Whilst there is no inherent problem with redirects, they can become expensive for Googlebot. Every hop uses another crawl request. Googlebot will follow up to five redirect hops. But just because it can, doesn't mean you should make it. Even one 301 redirect on a high-impact page can add in some friction and cause unnecessary waste.

• Conduct a redirect audit for all types of redirects on your site (301s, 302s, etc) 

• Update all internal links to point directly to the final destination instead of stacking 301 on top of 301 (eliminating redirect chains)

Remove dead ends

Dead ends are the silent crawl killers. When Googlebot encounters 4XX client errors and 5XX client errors, not only do they count toward your budget in various cases (see table below), but that’s a lost opportunity for Google to continue its crawl journey.  

404s

• Be sure to audit your internal links and update or remove any that point to 404s. 

• If a page is gone but has backlinks, set up a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page

• If the page is intentionally deleted permanently, set a 410 Gone status instead. This signals to Google to drop it faster

5XX errors

These are even more dangerous than 404 errors. If Googlebot repeatedly encounters 5XX server errors, whether from overloaded servers, caching issues, or dodgy APIs, it throttles crawling. In turn, this means fewer URLs discovered, and slower indexation / updates in search results. 

• Use server logs and/or Google’s Crawl Stats report to spot recurring 5xx patterns

• Work with your dev team to identify the root causes/s of these issues and to resolve them

• Set up monitoring to catch increases

Crawl Budget VS HTTP Status Codes

1xx (Informational)	Doesn't affect crawl budget
2xx (Success)	Consumes crawl budget
3xx (Redirect)	Consumes crawl budget
4xx (Client Error)Except 429	Doesn't affect crawl budget
5xx (Server Error)	Consumes crawl budget

Source: Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia Pacific 2025

What to do if Googlebot is crawling too much

On the other side of the spectrum, there may be cases where Googlebot crawls your site too much. This aggressive crawling behavior becomes problematic when your servers cannot handle the amount of crawl requests and results in site slowdown, higher error rate, and even downtime. 

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to detect and correct. You’l see spikes in crawl requests in your log files and Google crawl stats. To manage these upticks, simply serve 503 or 429 errors to Googlebot for a day or two. This signals Googlebot to back off without affecting long term crawling patterns and page indexing. 

Final thoughts: manage your budget wisely

Crawl budget isn’t  about forcing Google to crawl your site more; it's about making the most of the budget Google is willing to allocate to your site, and encourage it to use that allocation to the fullest. The faster, healthier, and better structured your site is, the easier it is for Googlebot to crawl more pages in less time.

That said, as mentioned from the outset, this isn’t something every site owner needs to obsess over. If your site contains less than a dozen-or-so thousand pages, Google can usually handle them without a problem. But for large, complex, or frequently updated sites, wasted crawl requests mean missed opportunities.

Through the approach of controlling what Google sees, guiding it to the right pages, and making every request count, you’re truly maximizing what’s available and giving Google every reason to fully tap into your site’s potential.

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Yossi Fest, technical SEO specialist at Wix

Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix. He's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Follow him on Linkedin.