URL Inspection tells you about one page. It tells you nothing about crawl budget.

URL Inspection tells you about one page. It tells you nothing about crawl budget.

Myth: the "last crawled" date in URL Inspection shows how Google's spending crawl on your site.

No. It's a single-URL snapshot, often from the index's cache, sometimes weeks stale, and rate-limited so you can't sample at scale. Useful for "is this one page indexed and why." Useless for "where is Google wasting its passes."

Here's the thing. Crawl budget is a distribution problem — which 5% of URLs eat 80% of the fetches. You can't see a distribution one inspection at a time. Logs show all of it at once.

The tradeoff: URL Inspection is precise and live for debugging a specific page. Logs are messy but comprehensive for patterns.

Don't audit a flood by sampling raindrops.