How to Check and Analyze Your Website's Crawl Budget Using Google Search Console

To check and analyze your website's crawl budget using Google Search Console (GSC), you primarily use the Crawl Stats report found in the Settings section of GSC. This report provides insights into how Googlebot crawls your site, including the number of crawl requests made, crawl response types, download size, and average response time.

Here is a step-by-step process:

1. Access Crawl Stats Report:

   • Log in to Google Search Console.
   • Click on Settings in the left-hand sidebar.
   • Scroll down to the Crawling section and click Open Crawl Stats Report.

2. Analyze Crawl Requests:

   • Look at the Total Crawl Requests over the last 90 days.
   • To estimate your daily crawl budget, divide the total crawl requests by 90. For example, if the total crawl requests are 5,570,000, the daily crawl budget is approximately 61,888 URLs crawled per day.

3. Evaluate Crawl Performance Metrics:

   • Review crawl responses to check for server errors or blocked URLs.
   • Check average response time to see if your server speed affects crawl capacity.
   • Monitor host status to ensure your site is reachable and healthy for crawling.

4. Estimate Crawl Budget Sufficiency:

   • Determine the total number of pages on your site (e.g., from your XML sitemap).
   • Divide the total pages by the average pages crawled per day.
   • If this ratio is higher than about 10, it indicates your crawl budget may be insufficient, meaning Googlebot takes a long time to crawl all pages, potentially delaying indexing of updates.

5. Use Insights to Optimize Crawl Budget:

   • Improve server response times to increase crawl capacity.
   • Fix crawl errors and remove unnecessary redirects or blocked pages.
   • Prioritize important pages by using sitemaps and internal linking.
   • Avoid crawling of low-value or duplicate pages by using noindex or robots.txt rules.

This method provides a practical way to monitor how much Googlebot crawls your site and identify potential crawl budget issues, enabling you to optimize your site’s crawl efficiency and SEO performance.