In practice
Keep commercially important pages within three clicks of the home page. Depth is a symptom of architecture, so the fix is linking, not pleading with the crawler.
Deep pages are usually the tail of paginated lists — solve it with hub pages and internal links rather than by adding sitemap entries.
Why it matters
Depth correlates with how often a page is recrawled and how much internal authority reaches it.
It is one of the few crawl metrics you control directly through navigation and linking decisions.
Related terms