Click depth
The fewest link clicks needed to reach a page from the homepage. Important pages should not be buried without a good reason.
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What it is
Click depth is the fewest link clicks needed to reach a page from the homepage or another chosen starting page. The homepage is depth zero, pages it links to are depth one, and so on. It describes the site's link graph, not the number of folders in a URL.
Use it to find important pages buried behind long navigation paths. Shallower paths help people and crawlers discover them, and internal links signal which pages matter. Breadcrumbs, category pages, topic hubs, and contextual links can reduce depth without flattening the whole information architecture.
The famous three-click rule came out of early-2000s web design books as a rule of thumb, and later usability testing found people keep clicking while the path still looks right. It was never a search engine limit. A useful page does not become unindexable on click four, and forcing every URL into the main navigation creates clutter. Measure shortest paths through real <a href> links, then prioritize depth according to the page's value.
Ask AI for it
Calculate click depth from the homepage by crawling only real internal <a href> links and using breadth-first search to record the shortest path to every canonical 200 URL. Report orphan pages, unreachable JavaScript-only routes, and commercially important pages deeper than three clicks. Reduce unnecessary depth with breadcrumbs, category or topic hub pages, and relevant contextual links, but do not dump every URL into the main navigation. Re-run the crawl and show each changed page's old depth, new depth, and shortest path.