Crawl Depth

Crawl depth (or click depth) refers to the number of clicks required to reach a specific webpage starting from the domain’s homepage. It is a critical metric for both site architecture and crawlability. Search engines assign the highest authority to pages closest to the homepage. If a revenue-driving product page has a crawl depth of four or five (meaning a user has to click five times to find it), Google assumes the page is unimportant and will rarely crawl or rank it. Flattening site architecture so every critical page is within three clicks of the homepage is a mandatory technical optimization.

Crawl Depth Simplified

Crawl depth is simply how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to a specific article or product. If it takes too many clicks to find a page, Google assumes that page isn’t important and will bury it at the bottom of the search results.