Crawl budget is a product of speed and cleanliness
Googlebot crawls faster when your origin answers quickly and returns real 200s for content you want indexed. Slow TTFB, redirect chains, and soft 404 HTML all reduce how many valuable URLs get revisited.
Large catalogs and faceted navigation make this urgent: filter combinations can create more URLs than your content team will ever edit — and still appear in sitemaps or internal links.
What AuditHQ’s Host & crawl probes look for
Apex vs www both serving without a clear preferred host.
Unbounded or noisy query-parameter spaces that multiply URLs.
Soft 404 patterns — pages that look empty or error-like while returning 200.
Budget crawl samples on the same host so you see issues beyond the homepage without pretending to be a full-site Screaming Frog run.
Sitemap hygiene that protects the signal
List only canonical, indexable 200 URLs. Drop redirects, noindex, and thin parameter pages from the sitemap.
Remove <priority> and <changefreq> — Google ignores them; they only add noise. Prefer accurate lastmod when you actually change the page.
Image sitemaps or image:image entries help important visuals; empty image coverage is a separate, optional finding — not a reason to pad the main sitemap with junk.
Fix order that recovers crawl capacity
1. Prefer one host and kill multi-hop redirects.
2. Block or canonicalize parameter traps in robots/canonicals — do not leave them linked and sitemapped.
3. Replace soft 404s with real 404/410 or real content.
4. Improve TTFB so Googlebot is willing to crawl more URLs per day.
Copy the SEO Fix-first or Host & crawl category AI prompt, ship the change, and re-audit until those rules clear.