You blocked your own rendering to "save crawl budget"

You blocked your own rendering to "save crawl budget"

Classic mistake: someone disallows /assets/, /js/, /css/ in robots.txt because "Googlebot wastes crawl on those files."

No. Here's the thing — Google renders pages with a headless Chromium. Block the CSS and JS and Googlebot sees a broken, half-empty DOM. Your nice layout, your lazy-loaded content, your internal links injected by JS — gone from its view.

Google's own docs say it plainly: don't block resources needed for rendering. The crawl those files cost is trivial; the indexing damage is not.

The fix: open up everything required to render. Audit it in the URL Inspection tool's rendered screenshot.

You didn't save budget. You blinded the renderer.