Google makes this clear that soft 404 pages do consume crawl budget, even the ones that result in the status of 200 OK. This impacts your site in the following way.
Google Gary Illyes has explained the effect of soft 404 errors on crawl budget with his own interpretation during the Search Central Live Asia Pacific 2025.
We already knew that the usual 4XX errors do not use crawl budget, but there is one very important detail to this, as Kenichi Suzuki posted on LinkedIn: soft 404s do consume crawl budget.
The issue of Soft 404s
In contrast to typical 404 pages, soft 404s serve as 200 OK responses, but they have messaging such as page not found or this product is out of stock.
It means that the server indicates the successful response, whereas the page body indicates something contrary.
According to Illyes, Google relies on content analysis to determine such inconsistencies.
When it finds patterns that indicate a missing or a devalued page, it marks the URL as a soft 404, despite an HTTP response code indicating that the page is itself good.
And in comparison, with those pages having the correct status 404, they spend crawl budget with no reward given in exchange.
This may cause a slower rate of discovering valuable content at larger sites and an inefficient utilization of crawl resources.
These types of pages can slip through technical checks because they return a valid status code but offer little or no value to search engines.
Final Thoughts
Soft 404s can seem innocent on the surface but they have technical repercussions. When they present inconsistencies between what is said by your server and what is shown by your page, they generate discrepancies that crawling and visibility. Soft 404s have become front-runners in terms of reviewing given the case of any site facing a problem in crawl performance.
