Checklist: find crawl-budget waste in 20 minutes

Checklist: find crawl-budget waste in 20 minutes
A tight sequence pulled from the people who do this for a living.
→ OnCrawl's log methodology — bucket Googlebot hits by URL pattern, then sort by hit count. Takeaway: the top 20 patterns usually hold 80% of the waste.
→ Screaming Frog log analyzer guide — cross-join logs with your crawl to flag URLs crawled but not in the sitemap. Takeaway: those orphans are pure budget drain.
★ Pick of the week — Gus Pelogia's parameter-URL teardown — counts Googlebot hits on ?sort=, ?filter=, faceted junk. Takeaway: one regex over a week of logs exposes the worst offenders instantly.
→ Google's "managing crawl budget" doc — confirms duplicate and soft-404 URLs eat budget. Takeaway: pair the doc with your own 404/302 counts from logs.
Work the patterns, not individual URLs — that's where the leverage is.