You have pages on your site that Google can’t find. They’re buried too deep or blocked by bad internal linking.
Crawl depth is why some of your content gets ignored no matter how well it’s written.
What Is a Crawl Depth Checker?
Crawl Depth Checker is a free browser-based tool that maps how far each page sits from your homepage based on internal links. You don’t need to log in — just plug in your domain and it crawls up to 500 pages.
It shows every URL, its crawl depth, and whether it’s indexed. You’ll see exactly which pages are too far from the front door.
Why It Matters for SEO
Google recrawls most sites every 3-7 days. If a page is at depth 5 or more, it might not get crawled at all. The deeper a page is, the less likely Google is to find and rank it.
Old posts die in obscurity not because they’re bad—but because they’re trapped at depth 6 behind five redirects. The real issue is that internal links aren’t distributed evenly. Most people miss that homepage links pass value, and each hop loses some.
If your blog category is at depth 2 and your articles sit at depth 4, they’re already at a disadvantage. That’s if they’re found at all.
How to Use It
- Go to https://scrawl.tools/tools/crawl-depth-checker (no login needed)
- Enter your domain and click “Start Crawl”
- Wait 1-3 minutes — it shows a tree map of your site’s crawl depth
The tool is free and runs in your browser. Nothing gets sent to servers. That means no sign-up, no email, no spam.
What the Results Tell You
You’ll see a list of URLs sorted by depth. Depth 0 is your homepage. Depth 1 is pages linked directly from it. Each number up means another click away.
Click any URL to see its inbound links and status code. If a page is at depth 5 and has no backlinks, Google probably hasn’t indexed it. Pages beyond depth 4 are high-risk.
The tool flags orphaned pages — those with no internal links pointing to them. These are invisible unless linked externally or in a sitemap. You’ll also spot pages blocked by robots.txt. Run those through the Robots.txt Tester to confirm access.
Depth isn’t the only factor, but it’s the one you can fix fast. Shallow sites outperform deep ones because Google crawls them faster.
3 Mistakes Most People Make
- Letting category hubs sit at depth 2 — that pushes all product and blog pages to depth 3-4. Here’s what actually happens: those pages get crawled once a month, if at all. Move key sections to depth 1 via main navigation.
- Using pagination without rel=”next/prev” or proper linking — this buries page 2, 3, and 4 of blog archives deep in the site. Google skips them because no significant page points to them directly.
- Relying on sitemaps alone — sitemaps help, but they don’t fix crawl depth. Most people miss that Google uses internal links to prioritize what to crawl. A page in your XML sitemap at depth 6 still has almost zero chance of regular crawling. Always cross-check with the XML Sitemap Validator.
Some sites have 30% of their pages at depth 5+. That’s an indexation disaster waiting to happen.
Fix deep pages by adding direct links from high-traffic, shallow pages. Update your footer, sidebar, or use a "Popular Posts" section. Every shortcut you add improves discovery.
Don’t assume Google finds everything. It doesn’t. You’ve got better content than your traffic shows — it’s just buried.
Check your site now at https://scrawl.tools/tools/crawl-depth-checker — it’s free, no login needed.