SEO

Crawl Depth Analyzer

Calculate how many clicks each page sits from the homepage using a breadth-first traversal of your internal links, finding pages buried too deep and pages unreachable altogether.

Last reviewed by the Radiatus Cloud team

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Click depth, not URL depth

A page at a long URL can be one click from the homepage, and a page at a short URL can be unreachable. What matters is the number of links a visitor must follow, which is a property of the link graph rather than of the address. Confusing the two leads to flattening URL structures that were never the problem, while the pages that are genuinely hard to reach stay hard to reach. This measures the link graph directly.

Depth correlates with everything that matters

Pages further from the homepage receive less internal link equity, are crawled less often, and are found by fewer visitors. The relationship is not a rule with a threshold; it is a gradient. What is reliably true is that a page nothing links to receives nothing at all, and that a page reachable only through six successive clicks is competing at a disadvantage it did not choose.

Fixing depth means adding links, not moving pages

Reducing depth is a matter of linking to important pages from pages that are already shallow, which is what navigation, hub pages and contextual links inside content are for. Restructuring URLs achieves nothing on its own, since a page moved to a shorter address that nothing links to is exactly as deep as it was. The fastest improvement on most sites is a hub page linking to everything in a section, itself linked from the main navigation.

Related tools

  • Meta Tag Analyzer — Check a page's meta tags for the problems that actually affect indexing and click-through.
  • Redirect Chain Checker — Trace the full path of redirects (301/302) to find loops or lost link juice.
  • Robots.txt Validator — Validate robots.txt syntax and check whether a specific URL is allowed or blocked for a given crawler.
  • Sitemap Generator (Lite) — Generate a valid XML sitemap with lastmod dates and correct structure, and learn which URLs belong in it and which do not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference from URL depth?

URL depth counts directory separators in the address. Click depth counts links followed from the homepage. They frequently disagree, and click depth is the one that affects crawling, equity and whether visitors find the page.

Is three clicks a real rule?

No. The three-click idea is a usability convention with no ranking mechanism behind it. Depth matters as a gradient rather than a threshold: further pages get less equity and less crawling, with no cliff at any particular number.

What makes a page unreachable?

No internal link pointing at it, or a path only through pages that are themselves unreachable. Such pages exist for visitors who have the URL and receive nothing from the site otherwise.

How do I reduce depth?

By linking to important pages from pages that are already shallow. Navigation, hub pages and contextual links inside content all work. Moving a page to a shorter URL changes nothing if the links stay the same.

Does this include links in navigation?

Only if you include them in the pasted graph. Site-wide navigation links make almost everything shallow, so exporting the full graph including navigation gives the true picture while a content-only graph shows how well the content links to itself.

Privacy & Security

Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Data: None
Client-side-Side
Active
v1.0

How to Use

Paste your internal link graph to see how many clicks each page is from the homepage.

Disclaimer: This tool is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. Results are for educational and utility purposes.