Click depth, or crawl depth, is the number of clicks that it takes someone to reach a specific page from the home page. The three-click rule is becoming a defining approach when it comes to driving revenue, as research shows that pages that are more than 5 clicks deep risk being skipped by bots. Large-language models, or LLMS, are driving this change, as shallower pages are easier to scan.
Examples of Sites that Have Good Page Depth
The best way to understand page depth is to look at the sites that get it right. Wikipedia, for example, ensures that every article links out to relevant pages. This creates multiple pathways through the entire site while drastically reducing page depth.
ASOS, a popular fashion retailer, handles tens of thousands of products yet maintains shallow architecture. NowTV also offers hundreds of shows and movies, but at the same time, it has clear categories to reduce clicks.
Those who play slots will also know how segmented and clear the platforms that host them are. By segmenting slots from Megaways titles and daily jackpot games, it becomes possible for users to find whatever they need in as few clicks as possible. At the same time, games from these categories are on the home page, allowing for ease of navigation.
Many sites offer great content, but the issue is that it is so deep in the architecture that search engines, and especially LLMs, can’t reach it. Whether it’s a product page, a blog article or even a service page, if an LLM can’t find it, you’re not likely to show up in AI searches.
What Causes Excessive Page Depth?
Pagination is one of the biggest contributors when it comes to page depth. If you have a category that has 5,000 products, even displaying 50 items per page will result in some products being hundreds of clicks away.
Retailers are combating this by trying to find ways to add filters or by adding curated hubs for different categories. If a site has faceted navigation, then this can create millions of variations for URLs too.
A clothing site may have options to filter clothes by size, colour, style, and material, which is great. The issue is that every combination will result in a different URL, meaning search engines are wasting valuable time on your site by crawling pages that probably don’t offer much value.
As if that wasn’t enough, tracking parameters can also create multiple versions of the same content. If there are malformed URLs, this can return a 200 OK status, rather than the standard 404 error, again, meaning search engines index pages that are not necessary, which will affect your ranking.
Page depth is one of those things that’s often overlooked, but even if your pages do contain valuable content and even generate some traffic, if it’s buried, then you may find that LLMs are far less likely to pick up on it. Making important content easy to reach is one of the best things you can do, and sites that focus on this moving forward stand to benefit the most.
