Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will fetch from your site within a time window. Small sites rarely hit the ceiling. Large sites with millions of URLs (e-commerce, marketplaces) hit it often and have to manage which URLs deserve crawl attention.

Crawl budget is determined by crawl rate limit (how fast you respond) and crawl demand (how important Google thinks your pages are). Faster servers and higher-authority pages get more budget.

For most marketing sites, the takeaway is simpler: keep your sitemap clean, fix broken internal links, return 410 (gone) instead of 404 for permanently dead URLs, and don't bloat the sitemap with low-value pages.