Click depth: what it means and how to fix it

What we look for

These pages have a crawl depth (the number of links Raptor followed from the start page to reach them) of more than 4 clicks.

Search engines tend to visit and value pages close to the home page more, so pages buried deep can be crawled less often and rank lower.

Link to important deep pages from the home page, a main menu or a hub page about their topic, so they sit fewer clicks from the start.

Depth is counted from the page this crawl started on, so a crawl started elsewhere gives other numbers.

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal: When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: links.high_crawl_depth
crawl.json and the CSV: The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "links.high_crawl_depth"
The HTML report: This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=links.high_crawl_depth
MCP: raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings { "job_id": "...", "check_id": "links.high_crawl_depth" }