What is crawl budget?

In one line

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given time, it matters most for large sites with many URLs.

In plain English

Google allocates finite crawling based on your site's health, speed, and authority. Waste it on duplicate, broken, or low-value URLs and important pages get crawled less often. Most small sites never hit their limit.

Why it matters for AI search

Efficient crawling means your fresh, important content gets discovered, and re-crawled after updates, faster, which keeps both search and AI sources current on what you publish.

Frequently asked

Should small sites worry about crawl budget?

Rarely, sites under a few thousand pages are usually crawled fully. It's a concern for large e-commerce and publishing sites.

How do I use crawl budget efficiently?

Fix broken links, reduce duplicate URLs and thin pages, keep the site fast, and use a clean sitemap so crawlers focus on what matters.

Put this into practice

Grade your site against our 250-point AEO/GEO checklist and see exactly what to fix, free, no signup.

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