What is Crawl Budget?
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.
Related terms
Crawling
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Crawl Rate Limit
How fast a crawler is allowed to hit a server, set in Search Console or robots-adjacent controls. Lower it during fragile migrations; raise it when capacity allows faster discovery.
URL Parameter
Query-string values (?sort=price) that create crawlable URL variants. Parameters expand URL space and slow rendering queues, so audits decide per parameter: crawl, canonicalize, or block.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Indexing
Storing and organizing crawled pages so they can be retrieved for queries. Indexing is selective: crawled does not mean indexed, and indexed does not mean ranking.
Robots.txt
A plain-text file at the domain root telling compliant crawlers which paths they may fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing: blocked URLs can still be indexed by URL if linked.