What is Crawl capacity?

Crawl capacity is essentially how much load your server can absorb. If Google sees it slowing down, meaning average response time is climbing, or it starts returning 503 errors, it backs off and crawls less.

And that’s all response time controls: the ceiling. It doesn’t make Google want your pages more. High capacity opens the door, but crawl demand decides how much walks through it.

In practice, on large sites this is the most available lever: improving server response time raises the ceiling almost immediately, and when the demand is there, crawl volume jumps to match.