Myth: crawl budget is a problem you need to fix

Myth: crawl budget is a problem you need to fix

'Q: How do I optimize my crawl budget? Everyone says it's critical.'

Short answer: For most stores, it isn't a problem at all — Google says crawl budget only matters past roughly a million URLs or with frequent change.

The longer version: crawl budget anxiety gets pushed onto sites that don't have the issue. Google has stated that sites under a few thousand URLs are almost always crawled efficiently and don't need to worry about it. If you have 800 products, obsessing over crawl budget is a distraction from things that actually move rankings — content, internal links, page experience.

When does it genuinely matter? Large catalogs (hundreds of thousands of URLs), or any size site that has accidentally generated infinite spaces — uncontrolled facets, session IDs in URLs, calendar pages. There, the fix is removing the junk URLs, not "optimizing" the crawl.

Rule of thumb: small catalog, ignore crawl budget. Huge catalog or infinite URLs, fix the structure.

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