Keep important pages within roughly three clicks of a crawled, linked entry point, and treat that as a working guide rather than a fixed rule. The reason to measure in clicks at all is that crawlers and link equity both travel along the paths you build. A page is “deep” not by how many folders sit in its URL, but by how many link hops separate it from the homepage or a well-crawled hub. Once that hop count climbs, the page starts to fall out of reach.
What happens at depth is a falloff in two things at once. Crawlers visit pages closer to entry points more often and more reliably, so a page buried many hops down gets discovered late and re-crawled rarely. At the same time, the link equity passed from one page to the next thins out as it travels the chain, since each page divides what it has among its own links. By the time the signal reaches a page sitting six or eight clicks in, very little is arriving, and the crawler may not be arriving often either.
There is no single click number that marks the cliff, which is why naming one as a rule misleads. A large, well-linked site can keep deep pages healthy because hubs and contextual links create short paths to them. A small site with weak internal linking can starve a page that is only four clicks down. The honest framing is a range tied to crawl behavior: the farther a page sits from a frequently crawled entry point, the less attention and equity it tends to get, and the curve is steep enough that “a few clicks” is a sensible ceiling to aim for.
To put this to work, map the click path to your most important deep pages and shorten it. Add a contextual link from a hub or a high-traffic page, surface the page in a relevant category or related-content block, or pull it up in the navigation if it genuinely earns the spot. Each move that cuts the hop count brings the page back inside the range where links and crawlers actually reach it.