Faceted Navigation

A site navigation pattern that lets users filter content by multiple attributes (color, size, price), often generating massive numbers of crawlable URL variations.

Faceted navigation is a filtering system common on ecommerce and marketplace sites that allows users to narrow results by multiple criteria simultaneously. Each filter combination typically generates a unique URL with query parameters, which can create millions of crawlable pages from a modest product catalog. Google's Gary Illyes has identified faceted navigation as the source of 50% of all crawling challenges Google encounters, making it the primary cause of crawl budget waste at scale.

Also known as