Crawl budget is checked primarily through two sources: Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report and your server logs. In GSC, navigate to Settings > Crawl Stats to see how many pages Google crawls daily, average response time, and file size metrics. For a typical small business site with 500–2,000 pages, you'll see crawl rates around 20–200 pages per day. Enterprise sites with 100,000+ pages might see 5,000–50,000 pages crawled daily, but even then, budget rarely becomes the bottleneck unless you have technical issues. Server logs give you the complete picture. Parse your Apache or Nginx logs for Googlebot user agents to count actual requests, which URLs get hit most, and crawl frequency patterns. Tools like Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer or custom scripts can aggregate this data. You want to compare pages crawled versus total indexable pages. If Google crawls 80%+ of your important pages every 7–14 days, you're fine. If key pages go weeks without a crawl, you likely have site architecture problems, not crawl budget problems. What actually matters more than raw crawl budget is crawl efficiency. Look for these waste patterns in your logs: - Googlebot hitting thousands of parameter URLs or session IDs - Crawling duplicate content across HTTP/HTTPS or www/non-www - Hitting pages blocked by robots.txt but still checking them - Orphaned pages with no internal links eating crawl resources At Ottawa SEO, we've seen clients panic about crawl budget when their real issue was 15,000 auto-generated tag pages with thin content. Google was crawling them, but shouldn't have been. Fix that with noindex, canonical tags, or deleting the waste, and suddenly important pages get crawled faster. For sites under 10,000 pages with clean architecture, crawl budget is almost never your SEO problem. Focus on site speed, internal linking, and content quality first. Only obsess over crawl optimization if you're running a massive e-commerce site, news platform, or domain portfolio where you're adding hundreds of pages weekly.