Google Says: Soft 404 Pages Still Consume Crawl Budget
Soft 404s Pose Hidden Challenges for Webmasters
Gary Illyes from Google made a critical technical point clear for website owners and SEO professionals during a recent Search Central Live Asia Pacific 2025 update: soft 404 pages still use up crawl budget, even if they return a valid 200 OK result.
SEO expert Kenichi Suzuki posted this information on LinkedIn. It highlighted how Google’s crawler treats soft 404s differently from typical 4XX errors.
What is a “soft 404” page?
Soft 404s are pages that look broken or empty to visitors but nonetheless send a 200 OK HTTP response. This is different from regular 404 failures, which send a clear “not found” message to search engines. Here are several examples:
- Pages for products that are “out of stock”
- Event listings that are no longer valid
- Profiles that have been deleted
- Pages for categories or search results that are empty
These pages may look good to a server, but Google’s content analysis can tell that they don’t offer much value and mark them as soft 404s.
How Soft 404s Affect Crawl Budget
Gary Illyes said that soft 404 pages still consume up Google’s crawl budget, while traditional 404 or 410 problems are frequently skipped right away by Googlebot. Google has to study the page’s content first to figure out if it’s a soft 404, which takes more time and work.
For large websites, this can slow things down—important pages might take longer to get indexed, and the site may not show up as quickly in search results, which can hurt its visibility.
How to Detect Soft 404s
Website owners can identify soft 404s using the Google Search Console. The “Index Coverage” report includes a specific section highlighting these pages.
Common Causes of Soft 404s:
- Pages that don’t provide any useful information
- Items that are still live but marked as unavailable
- Pages that are made on the fly and don’t show any search results
- Content that has been removed but not redirected
Best Practices to Avoid Crawl Waste
To prevent soft 404s from draining your crawl budget, Google recommends:
- Return a proper 404 or 410 status when content is removed
- When material has been moved for good, use 301 redirects
- Avoid empty pages—use structured data for out-of-stock notices
- Build helpful custom 404 pages to assist users and clarify content status
Final Thoughts
Soft 404s may not seem dangerous, but they can make crawling far less efficient and make it harder for more critical content to be seen. To keep your SEO in good shape, you need to make sure that the information on your pages and the answers from your servers are always the same.
You should now make reviewing and fixing soft 404s a top priority if your website concerns about crawl budget or indexing performance.