Google allocates a limited number of pages to crawl on your site each day. This is your crawl budget. Every broken link your site contains wastes part of that budget.
Here is how it works and what to do about it.
Crawl budget is the number of URLs Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given time frame. For small sites (under a few thousand pages) it is rarely an issue. For larger sites it matters a lot.
Google discovers new URLs through links. When Googlebot follows a broken link, it hits a 404 page. That is a wasted crawl.
Imagine Googlebot arrives to crawl your site. It has time for 500 URLs today. But 50 of the links on your homepage point to deleted pages. Googlebot follows each one, gets a 404, and moves on.
That is 50 wasted requests. Googlebot could have used those to discover new products, new blog posts, or important landing pages. Instead it found nothing.
The more broken links you have, the more of your crawl budget goes to waste. Over time this means:
Use Google Search Console to see how many pages Google has crawled. If Google is crawling more pages than you have, some are likely broken.
To find the broken links themselves:
Step 1: Scan your site for broken links today.
Step 2: Fix every 404 you find.
Step 3: Set up weekly monitoring so new broken links are caught early.
Every broken link you fix gives Googlebot more time to crawl your real content.