Click depth

What this check looks for

This check reads the crawl depth recorded for each page — the number of link hops the crawler took to reach it from the seed URL along the shortest path it found. A depth greater than 4 warns, reporting the exact depth. A depth of 4 or fewer passes.

Why it matters

Pages buried many clicks deep receive less internal link equity and are visited less often by crawlers, since both search engine crawlers and real visitors are less likely to follow a long chain of clicks to reach them — crawl frequency and priority tend to correlate with how shallow a page sits in the site's structure. A deep page is also just harder for a human to stumble onto through normal browsing, which limits its organic traffic potential regardless of how well-optimized its content is. AI systems that navigate a site to build context similarly tend to sample shallow, well-linked pages more thoroughly than ones several hops deep, so pages meant to be discovered and cited need a shorter path from the homepage.

How to fix it

Add links from higher-level pages — category hubs, the homepage, or a related-content module — so the shortest path to the page shortens:

<!-- Homepage links only to top-level categories -->
<nav>
  <a href="/audio">Audio</a>
</nav>
<!-- /audio links only to sub-categories, /audio/headphones links to the product -->

<!-- Add a direct shortcut from a high-traffic page -->
<section>
  <h2>Featured this week</h2>
  <a href="/audio/headphones/wireless-nc">Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones</a>
</section>

Flattening a deep category hierarchy, or adding featured/related links from shallow pages, is usually faster than restructuring the whole navigation.