Click depth: indexable pages many clicks from the homepage

What click depth is

Click depth is the number of links a visitor, or a crawler, follows from the homepage to reach a page. The homepage is depth 0, a page linked from it is depth 1, and so on.

Search engines crawl shallow pages more often and read the links on them as a sign of importance. A page buried five clicks down is visited less, passes on less internal link weight, and is easy to forget when the site grows. Nothing is broken, which is why the rule is advisory: some pages are deep on purpose.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide. It builds the graph of dofollow internal links found in the crawl and finds the shortest path from the homepage to every page by breadth-first search. The depth is a property of the link graph, not of the order the crawler visited pages: a page the homepage links to is depth 1 however it was queued. It emits a single check named click-depth:

• Skipped for a single-page audit, or when the homepage was not among the crawled pages. The check says why.
• Warn when an indexable page is more than the threshold (default 3) clicks away. Message: 2 indexable page(s) are more than 3 clicks from the homepage, deepest at 5. Items are ordered deepest first, each with its depth, and details carries the total, the deepest depth and the threshold used.
• Pass otherwise. Message: No indexable page is more than 3 clicks from the homepage.
• When the crawl stopped at its page cap the message adds that depths are a lower bound, and details.lowerBound is true. Raise max_pages for a complete picture.

What is left out, on purpose:

• Pages with no link path. A page found only through the sitemap is not given a depth. links/orphan-pages reports those.
• Noindex pages, redirects and error responses are never listed. A noindex page still passes on its links, so pages behind it keep their shorter path. A page reached only through a redirect has no seen path and is not listed.
• Nofollow links are not followed. Links from the page the audit started on count as depth 1, the same as links from the homepage.

How to fix it

Shorten the path to the pages that matter. Link them from the homepage, a hub or category page, or the main navigation. Breadcrumbs, related-content blocks and “latest” lists add shortcuts without a redesign. Pagination is a common cause: a post on page 12 of an archive is 13 clicks deep, and a link from a topic page fixes that.

If a page is deep on purpose, raise the threshold or disable the rule.

Options

Configuration example

[rule_options."links/click-depth"]
maxDepth = 5

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["links/click-depth"]

Disable all Links rules

[rules]
disable = ["links/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["links/click-depth"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• links/orphan-pages: pages with no link path at all.
• links/weak-internal-links: pages with a single inbound link.
• links/no-contextual-inbound: pages linked only from sitewide chrome.
• links/dead-end-pages: the outbound side of the same structure.

Links findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Make your links crawlable, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Links section of the report. Every indexable page past the threshold is listed with its depth. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.