Bing Crawl Budget How It Works
Crawl budget is the number of pages Bing will crawl on your site within a given time period. Understanding how Bing allocates it and how IndexNow changes the equation is essential for large sites.
What Determines Bing Crawl Budget?
Site authority & popularity
Higher-authority sites (more inbound links) get more crawl budget
Server response time
Fast servers (< 200ms) enable higher crawl rates without overload
Crawl errors
404s, 500s, and slow pages reduce budget allocated to your site
Content freshness signals
Sites that update content frequently are crawled more often
IndexNow submissions
Direct URL notifications bypass the crawl queue entirely triggered immediately
How IndexNow Changes Crawl Budget
Traditional crawling: Bing discovers your pages through links and sitemap submissions, then adds them to a priority queue. Your pages might wait days or weeks before being crawled.
With IndexNow: You proactively tell Bing "this URL has new or updated content". Bing processes the notification immediately and typically crawls the page within 1–4 hours.
| Aspect | Traditional Crawl | With IndexNow |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery time | Days to weeks | 0 you tell Bing directly |
| Crawl wait time | 1 day to several weeks | 1–4 hours typically |
| Crawl budget usage | Spends budget on all pages | Prioritizes only changed pages |
| Index freshness | Potentially stale for days | Near real-time |
Monitor Crawl Budget in BWT
- 1.Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools
- 2.Navigate to Reports → Crawl → Crawl Statistics
- 3.Review "Pages crawled per day" trend over 90 days
- 4.Check "Crawl Errors" for 404s and slow pages reducing your budget
- 5.Use "Crawl Control" to schedule crawls during off-peak hours