Crawl budget is how many pages Googlebot will actually crawl on your site during a specific period. It's controlled by two factors: crawl rate limit (server capacity) and crawl demand (how interested Google is in your content). For most sites under 10,000 pages, crawl budget isn't a constraint you'll ever notice. Google crawls what matters without issue. For larger sites or ones with technical problems, it becomes critical. Crawl capacity is the speed at which Google can request pages without overloading your server. If your server responds slowly or throws errors, Google backs off. Crawl demand is driven by how popular your pages are and how frequently they update. A news site publishing 200 articles daily has higher crawl demand than a static brochure site that hasn't changed in months. Crawl budget problems show up when Google wastes time on low-value URLs: infinite calendar pages, session ID parameters, faceted navigation creating thousands of duplicate product variations. On a 50,000-page e-commerce site, if Google spends 60% of its crawl budget on parameterized junk, your new products might not get indexed for weeks. We optimize crawl budget by blocking wasteful paths in robots.txt, using canonical tags to consolidate duplicate variants, fixing redirect chains that burn multiple crawl requests per page, and ensuring XML sitemaps only list indexable URLs. Server response time matters too. A site that loads in 600ms versus 2.1 seconds will get crawled more aggressively because Google can process more pages per second without triggering rate limits. For Ottawa businesses running standard WordPress sites with 80 to 300 pages, crawl budget is a non-issue. For clients managing multi-location franchises with 15,000+ dynamically generated pages or legacy platforms with messy URL structures, it's one of the first technical constraints we audit. The difference between Google discovering a new product page in 3 days versus 6 weeks is often just eliminating crawl waste.