“Crawl budget” is often misunderstood as a dial Google gives you. In practice, it is the intersection of crawl demand, server capacity, and discovery paths. Logs show which paths are hammered, which return soft errors, and which infinite spaces still exist.
Align robots rules with business reality: block low-value parameter storms and internal search shells, but don’t hide important faceted URLs that drive revenue without an alternate discovery path. Pair with internal linking tests: orphan templates show up as stable crawl noise.
Ship changes in small batches. Watch response times and error rates alongside crawl volume. The goal is fewer wasteful fetches and cleaner signals—not a perfect robots file that changes weekly.