If you are concerned at all about your site’s crawl budget, you will be happy to learn that RankBrain does not have any impact on crawl budget.

John Mueller was asked about whether or not RankBrain could impact a site’s crawl budget.

Crawl budget is a metric used in relation to both how much time Googlebot (or another search engine bot) spends on a website, as well as how many pages and other resources it is able to crawl in that time.

While most smaller sites don’t need to worry about crawl budget, unless they are on a very slow server, some larger sites need to pay attention to it in order to ensure their most important pages are being indexed, as well as to get as many other nearly-as-important pages indexed.

There are many factors that play a role in a site’s crawl budget, but the one most easily influenced by site owners is simply page speed.  Googlebot is conscious of not hitting a website harder (for more pages) that it thinks the site can handle.  After all, Google doesn’t want to accidentally take down a website’s server for crawling too aggressively.  PageRank, technical SEO and site architecture also play roles in determining a site’s crawl budget.

But the use of RankBrain is definitely not one of them, which should be great news for SEOs, as there is still much to learn about RankBrain.