Crawl Budget
The number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site in a given time period.
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from your site in a given period. It only constrains large sites, and it is wasted on things that should never be crawled: faceted URLs, infinite parameter combinations, redirect chains and soft 404s. Cleaning those up matters more than trying to raise the budget.
Definition
Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site within a given timeframe. It is determined by two factors: crawl rate limit (how fast Google can crawl without overloading your server) and crawl demand (how much Google wants to crawl based on popularity and freshness).
Why It Matters
For sites with 10,000+ pages, crawl budget matters. If Google spends its budget crawling low-value pages (faceted navigation, parameters), your important pages may not get crawled for weeks.
Example
An e-commerce site with 500K products and 2M filter URLs was wasting 80% of its crawl budget on filter pages. Adding noindex to filters and cleaning up the sitemap restored full product page crawling within days.
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