Short definition
How many pages a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given time.
Beginner In plain English
Search engines will not read every page of a site every day. Crawl budget is how much attention your site gets, so you want that attention spent on important pages.
Professional How pros use it
Mostly a concern for large sites (tens of thousands of URLs or more). Waste comes from faceted navigation, parameters, redirect chains and soft 404s. Improve it with clean internal linking, accurate sitemaps and blocking low-value URL patterns.
Examples
- An online store generating thousands of filter URLs.
- Old redirect chains that crawlers keep following.
More detail
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given time. It mostly matters for very large sites.
In client work, you will often need to explain this term in plain language, so practice describing it in one sentence.
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