Crawl budget gets argued about far more than it gets diagnosed. For a 40-page service site it is genuinely irrelevant — Google will crawl everything you have, repeatedly, whatever you do. For an Indian ecommerce site with faceted navigation and 200,000 crawlable URLs behind 6,000 real products, it is the reason new products take five weeks to appear in search.
The question worth asking is not "do I have a crawl budget problem" in the abstract. It is "is Googlebot spending its time on my important pages or on junk", and the server logs answer it in an afternoon.
The threshold
Below roughly 10,000 URLs, stop worrying. Google's own guidance holds: crawl budget is not a concern at that scale, and the time is better spent on content and links.
Above that, the signals that you have a real problem are specific. New pages take more than two or three weeks to get indexed with no other explanation. Search Console's Crawl Stats shows a request volume far higher than your actual page count. The Pages report shows large numbers under "Crawled — currently not indexed" or "Discovered — currently not indexed". And in the logs, the URLs Googlebot hits most often are parameter combinations no human has ever visited.
Where it goes wrong in practice
Faceted navigation is the usual culprit, and Indian ecommerce is particularly exposed because colour, size, brand, price band and sort order all tend to be crawlable links. Five facets with a handful of values each multiply into six figures of URLs, all serving near-identical content. Every one of those requests is crawl capacity not spent on your category pages.
Internal search result pages are the second offender — linked from somewhere, indexable, infinite. Session or tracking parameters appended to internal links create a fresh URL for the same page every time. Calendar and pagination patterns that run forever. And a long tail of 301 chains left behind by two site migrations, each one costing an extra request.
Slow response times compound all of it. Googlebot adjusts its rate to what your server can take; a p95 of 2.5 seconds on a Hostinger or shared-hosting setup means fewer URLs crawled per day regardless of how clean your architecture is. On large Indian sites, hosting is often the real constraint and the facet cleanup gets blamed for not working.
What actually fixes it
In rough order of impact:
Block parameter crawling at the source. Facet combinations that produce no unique demand should not be linked with crawlable hrefs at all. robots.txt disallow for the parameter patterns is blunt but effective. Canonical tags alone do not solve this — Google still has to crawl a URL to read its canonical, so the request is already spent.
Keep the ones with real demand. "red running shoes size 9" may deserve an indexable page. Decide from keyword data, not by leaving everything open.
Fix redirect chains. Point every internal link at the final URL. Two migrations usually leave a lot of these.
Remove internal search from the crawl path and make sure your XML sitemaps list only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs. A sitemap full of redirects and 404s teaches Google to trust it less.
Then look at server response time, because it caps everything else.
The monthly check that catches most of this before it becomes serious takes about ten minutes: the monthly ten-minute audit
Measuring the fix
Watch three numbers over the following month: total crawl requests in Crawl Stats (should fall), the share of requests hitting canonical product and category URLs in the logs (should rise), and time-to-index for newly published pages (should shorten). If request volume drops and indexing does not improve, crawl budget was not your problem and you have just learned something useful.
Log file analysis is the only way to see any of this properly, and it is the step most teams skip because the logs are awkward to get from shared hosting. A single day of logs is usually enough to show you where the waste is. For large-catalogue sites, working out which facets deserve to stay crawlable is a judgement call worth getting help with — https://deepbhardwaj.com/seo-expert-in-india/