What Is a Crawl Budget, and Why Can Understanding Crawling Become Important When Working on a Very Large Website?

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If you are learning Bing SEO, crawl budget is an important concept when working with very large websites.

In simple terms, crawl budget refers to the amount of crawling Bingbot can reasonably perform for a website during a given period. It is not necessarily a single fixed number of pages assigned to every website. Bing’s crawler uses algorithms to determine which sites to crawl, how often to crawl them, and how many pages to fetch.

This becomes particularly important when a website contains thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of URLs.

What Does “Crawl Budget” Actually Mean?

Imagine you manage a website containing 500,000 URLs.

Bingbot cannot continuously request every URL whenever it wants. Crawling requires resources from both Bing and your website’s servers.

Bing therefore has to decide:

Which URLs should be crawled?
Which URLs need to be revisited?
How frequently should they be checked?
Which pages are worth crawling first?
How many requests should be made?

Bing describes its approach as crawl efficiency. Its crawler tries to discover new and fresh content while avoiding unnecessary crawling of unchanged or duplicate content.

So, rather than thinking:

“Bing gives my website exactly 10,000 crawl requests.”

Think:

“Bing allocates crawling according to the value, freshness, efficiency, and technical conditions of my website.”

Why Is Crawl Budget More Important for Large Websites?

For a small website, crawl management usually isn’t a major concern.

Imagine a website with:

50 pages

Bingbot can potentially discover and crawl those pages without dealing with a massive URL inventory.

Now imagine an ecommerce website with:

500,000 product and category URLs

The situation becomes very different.

The website may contain:

Product pages
Category pages
Filter URLs
Sorting URLs
Search-result pages
Pagination URLs
Blog posts
PDFs
Duplicate URLs
Expired products
Parameter-based URLs

If thousands of URLs provide little value, Bingbot may spend crawling resources on pages that aren’t important.

That is what makes crawl efficiency especially important on large websites.

Bing’s current Webmaster Guidelines specifically warn that excessive low-value URLs, duplication, and crawl waste can delay indexing of important content.

What Can Consume Crawl Resources?

Several types of URLs can create unnecessary crawling.

1. Duplicate URLs

Suppose the same product is accessible through:

example.com/product/shoes
example.com/product/shoes?color=red
example.com/product/shoes?sort=popular
example.com/product/shoes?ref=category

If these URLs don’t provide meaningful unique content, they can create unnecessary URL variations.

Bing recommends reducing unnecessary duplicate and low-value URLs to improve crawl efficiency.

2. URL Parameters

Large websites often generate URLs containing parameters.

For example:

/products?color=blue
/products?size=10
/products?sort=price
/products?filter=discount

An ecommerce site can accidentally create thousands of combinations.

If these URLs provide little unique value, they can create what SEO professionals commonly call crawl waste.

3. Internal Search Pages

Large websites sometimes generate URLs for internal searches:

/search?q=shoes
/search?q=shirts
/search?q=laptops

There may be thousands of possible combinations.

If search-result URLs aren’t useful for search-engine users, allowing crawlers to spend significant resources on them may be inefficient.

4. Broken or Redirecting URLs

A large website may accumulate:

404 pages
Redirect chains
Redirected URLs
Deleted URLs
Broken internal links

These can make crawling less efficient.

Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines recommend handling URL moves properly and removing deleted URLs cleanly.

What Factors Influence Bing’s Crawling?

Bing considers multiple factors when determining crawling behavior.

These can include:

Website size

The number of URLs affects how much content needs to be crawled.

Content freshness

Frequently updated content may need more frequent checking.

URL relevance

Bing prioritizes relevant known URLs that may need indexing or updating.

Server capacity

Your website needs to handle Bingbot’s requests without harming normal visitors.

Crawl settings

Robots.txt and Bing Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Control can influence crawler behavior.

Website efficiency

Duplicate, low-value, or unnecessarily complicated URL structures can reduce crawl efficiency.

Crawl Budget Does Not Mean “Bing Will Stop Crawling”

This is another important point for beginners.

If you have a website with 100,000 URLs, it does not mean Bing will simply choose a fixed number and ignore everything else forever.

Bing continuously manages crawling based on its systems and available signals.

Its goal is to crawl efficiently while keeping its index fresh. Bing says it crawls billions of URLs and tries to avoid both insufficient crawling and excessive crawling.

So crawl budget is better understood as a resource-management concept, rather than a simple quota.

Why Crawl Budget Can Affect Indexing

Consider this example.

Your website has:

100,000 URLs

But only:

20,000 URLs are genuinely valuable

Now imagine the website generates:

80,000 unnecessary parameter and duplicate URLs

Bingbot may encounter a huge number of URLs that don’t contribute much unique value.

Bing’s current guidelines state that excessive crawl waste can delay indexing of important content.

Therefore, the SEO objective isn’t:

“Get Bingbot to crawl everything.”

It is:

“Help Bingbot spend its crawling resources efficiently on valuable URLs.”

How Can SEO Professionals Improve Crawl Efficiency?

For large websites, several practices can help.

1. Improve Internal Linking

Make important pages easy to reach through logical internal links.

For example:

Homepage → Category → Subcategory → Product

This gives Bing clear paths for discovering important URLs.

Bing recommends crawlable internal links as one of its URL discovery practices.

2. Maintain an Accurate XML Sitemap

Your XML sitemap should contain the important canonical URLs you want Bing to discover.

Bing recommends keeping sitemaps current, removing deleted or redirected URLs, and using accurate lastmod information where applicable.

For a large website, this becomes particularly important because your sitemap provides Bing with a structured view of important URLs.

3. Reduce Duplicate URLs

Use appropriate canonicalization and website architecture to prevent unnecessary URL variations.

This is especially important for:

Ecommerce filters
Tracking parameters
Sorting URLs
Session-based URLs
Duplicate category paths

Bing specifically recommends eliminating duplicate or low-value URLs as part of crawl-efficiency management.

4. Block Unnecessary Crawl Paths

If certain URL areas don’t need crawling, robots.txt can help control crawler access.

For example:

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /internal-search/
Disallow: /temporary/

However, don’t block important pages accidentally.

Bing emphasizes that robots.txt controls crawl access, not indexing.

5. Use IndexNow for Important Changes

For websites that frequently update content, IndexNow can notify Bing about URLs that have been added, updated, or deleted.

This can help Bing learn about changes without relying entirely on traditional discovery processes.

Remember that IndexNow is a notification mechanism. It does not guarantee crawling or indexing.

6. Monitor Crawl Errors

Bing Webmaster Tools provides crawl-related information, including:

Crawl requests
Crawl errors
Indexed pages

These metrics can help you identify whether technical problems are interfering with crawling.

For large websites, monitoring these numbers regularly can reveal problems before they affect large sections of the site.

What Is Crawl Control?

Bing provides a Crawl Control feature within Bing Webmaster Tools.

It allows website owners to influence how quickly Bingbot makes requests during different hours.

For example:

Time	Crawl preference
9 AM–5 PM	Slower
5 PM–9 AM	Faster

This can help reduce server load during busy periods.

Bing explains that Crawl Control lets webmasters adjust crawling speed across the 24 hours of the day.

However, don’t automatically reduce crawling simply because you have a large website.

For large sites, overly restrictive crawling can make it harder for Bingbot to reach all important content. Bing has specifically noted that very low crawl settings can make large websites difficult to crawl thoroughly.

How Can You Think About Crawl Budget as an SEO Intern?

Use this simple analogy.

Imagine Bingbot has a limited amount of time and attention to spend exploring your website.

Your website contains:

10,000 valuable pages

and

90,000 low-value URLs

You want Bingbot to spend more of its crawling effort discovering and refreshing the valuable pages.

So your job is not necessarily to increase crawling everywhere.

Your job is to reduce unnecessary crawling and improve the paths toward important content.

Example: Large Ecommerce Website

Imagine an ecommerce website with 1 million URLs.

The website sells clothing.

It has:

100,000 product pages
10,000 category pages
50,000 informational pages
840,000 filter and parameter combinations

The SEO team discovers that many filter URLs contain little unique content.

Instead of allowing Bingbot to spend significant resources exploring every variation, the team can improve the architecture by:

Identifying valuable canonical URLs.
Improving internal links.
Maintaining accurate XML sitemaps.
Reducing unnecessary URL variations.
Controlling unnecessary crawl paths.
Using IndexNow for meaningful changes.
Monitoring crawling and indexing through Bing Webmaster Tools.

The goal is better crawl efficiency, not simply more crawling.

Crawl Budget vs Crawl Efficiency

These terms are related but slightly different.

Concept	Simple meaning
Crawl budget	The crawling resources available for a website
Crawl frequency	How often Bingbot revisits URLs
Crawl efficiency	How effectively crawling discovers fresh or valuable content
Crawl waste	Crawling URLs that provide little useful value
Indexing	Processing pages for possible inclusion in Bing’s index

Bing itself emphasizes crawl efficiency and defines it around discovering new and fresh content per page crawled. Crawling unchanged or duplicated content unnecessarily reduces that efficiency.

How Do You Know Whether Crawling Is a Problem?

As an SEO intern, don’t assume that a large website automatically has a crawl-budget problem.

Look for evidence.

Bing Webmaster Tools’ Search Performance report includes crawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages.

Bing’s Site Explorer can also help you investigate discovered URLs, crawl issues, robots.txt restrictions, and URL-level information.

You can then ask:

Are important pages being discovered?
Are important pages being indexed?
Are crawl errors increasing?
Are huge numbers of low-value URLs being crawled?
Are duplicate URLs consuming attention?
Are important new pages taking too long to appear?

That is a much better approach than simply trying to increase the crawl rate.

Final Takeaway

Crawl budget is essentially about managing Bingbot’s crawling resources efficiently across a website.

It becomes increasingly important as websites grow larger because thousands or millions of URLs can include duplicates, parameters, low-value pages, redirects, and other unnecessary URLs.

Bing’s current guidance says excessive crawl waste can delay indexing of important content.

As an SEO intern, remember this simple principle:

Don’t just ask, “How can I get Bingbot to crawl more?” Ask, “How can I help Bingbot crawl the right pages efficiently?”

That mindset is especially valuable when working on large ecommerce websites, news websites, marketplaces, directories, and other sites with massive URL counts.