Crawl Depth.

Crawl depth is the number of internal link hops Googlebot must follow from the homepage to reach a specific page. A page linked directly from the homepage has a crawl depth of 1; a page linked from a category page (depth 1) which is linked from the homepage has a crawl depth of 2, and so on.

Crawl Depth and Indexing Priority

Googlebot allocates crawl budget based on page priority signals—and crawl depth is a significant proxy for importance. Pages at depth 1–2 are crawled frequently. Pages at depth 5+ may only be crawled occasionally or missed entirely, particularly on large sites with limited crawl budget. This makes crawl depth reduction a high-priority technical SEO task for deep e-commerce catalogues and large content archives.

Crawl Depth vs Click Depth

Crawl depth and click depth are often used interchangeably, but there is a subtle distinction: click depth is the minimum number of clicks a human user needs to navigate to a page following the shortest available path in the UI. Crawl depth is the number of links Googlebot follows during its crawl—which may differ if crawl paths diverge from user navigation paths due to JavaScript rendering or sitemap-guided crawling.