Google's Crawl Budget Covers All Googlebot Activities, Not Just Web Search

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot can and wants to crawl on a site within a given timeframe. It's a balance between not overloading the site's server and ensuring that the most important pages are frequently crawled and indexed.

Yes, Merchant Center crawling does count towards the Google crawl budget. As John Mueller confirmed, any automatic updates and crawling activities for the Merchant Center are considered a load on the server and are included in the overall crawl budget.

Managing crawl budget is important to prevent your server from being overloaded by Googlebot's activities. The goal is to avoid server issues while allowing Googlebot to efficiently crawl and index the site's most significant pages.

Google has a detailed document on crawl budget which can be found by following the link to the crawl budget documentation mentioned in the text. This document provides in-depth information on how crawl budget works and how to manage it.