High-value content is buried too deep in navigation

A page gets this finding when the route to it from the home page is longer than 3 clicks and it also holds at least 150 words of text. Both numbers live in config/thresholds.json under rule_engine.SIT-02 as max_click_depth_for_high_value_pages: 3 and min_words_for_high_value_page: 150. The first comes from the product specification; the second is our proposal, marked PROPOSAL in the config.

The word-count condition is deliberate: without it the finding would fire on every utility page buried deep in a menu, which is usually fine. The point is to find content worth finding that is buried, not a cookie settings page.

What the check does not do:

• It does not count clicks the way a person would. Depth is the shortest route by which our crawler discovered the page, not the route a visitor would take. A footer link available everywhere cuts the depth to one even if reaching the content through the navigation takes five steps.
• It knows nothing about your navigation's structure. It does not distinguish the main menu, breadcrumbs, the footer or in-text links.
• It does not judge content quality. “High textual value” here means 150 words, no more. An auto-generated listing with a long description passes as valuable content.
• It does not account for language. The same text will count fewer words in German than in English.
• It never runs on pages the crawler did not visit.

The finding is page-level; severity is warning.

We have no evidence that shortening the route to content improves your chances of being cited in an AI answer, and click depth is, on top of that, one of the most over-rated numbers in all of SEO. Hence the “effect not demonstrated” class, and hence our wish to be especially careful with this one.

Google documents no click-depth limit. Not three, not any other. The 3 in our config is a convention borrowed from practice, not a search engine's threshold, and we do not claim anything flips past it.

What is documented, and what genuinely stands behind this finding: a page must be discovered to be indexed, and it must be indexed to appear in AI answers. Google has the second half in its own documentation and it is the strongest claim this product has. Depth relates to discovery indirectly: the further away content sits, the likelier a limited crawl never reaches it.

But where the value of this finding really lies: with people. Content five steps away will not be found by a visitor either. If you have an honest article nobody knows about, the problem is not how a crawler reads it; it is that you hid it.

We do not claim that internal linking boosts a page's authority. Domain authority, backlinks and domain age have no documented support in the context of AI visibility; we deliberately keep them out of the score and will keep doing so.

The cheapest fix does not mean rebuilding your navigation. A route can be shortened from three directions and usually one is enough:

1. A link from a hub page that is already close. A category page, a service overview, an article listing (anywhere at depth one or two).
2. In-text links from related pages. The most natural route and the most useful for readers: a link from an article that mentions the topic reaches a visitor exactly where they need it.
3. Adding it to the footer or the main menu. It works reliably, but use it sparingly; a footer crammed with links stops being navigation.

When many pages appear at once, do not fix them one by one. Look at the structure:

• Pagination is the most common cause. When an article listing is split ten to a page and older content sits on page fifteen, every one of those is deep. The answer is a hub by topic or by year, not a longer listing.
• Too many category levels. Three levels of nesting plus the page itself is already four clicks before you start.
• Content reachable only through on-site search. A crawler will not fill in your search box. Anything reachable only that way does not exist for it.

And a piece of advice that applies here more than elsewhere: go through the list and feel free to ignore part of it. A 2019 archive buried in the navigation is probably right where it belongs. This finding earns its keep only where something is buried that should not have been.