How many links on a page: Crawl Audit check 47

Short answer: check 47 warns when a page has 150 links or more. Google doesn't give a number. Its documentation says "There's no magical ideal number of links a given page should contain", then adds: "However, if you think it's too much, then it probably is." So treat 150 as Crawl Audit's rule of thumb, and a warning as a prompt to look at whether all those links help a visitor.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: fewer than 150 <a href> links on the page, internal and external together.
• Warning: 150 or more.

Menus and footers count. Our homepage has 99 links, 83 of them internal, and most of those are the menu and the footer.

When a page really has too many links

• Mega-menus that list every product on every page.
• Footers with dozens of city or keyword links that no visitor would use.
• Tag clouds and archive lists repeated in a sidebar on every post.

The test is a person, not a number: would a visitor use these links, and can they find the one they need? If the answer is no, cut the list down to the links people actually click, and move long lists to a hub page.

What not to do

• Don't hide links to get under the number. Links that aren't real <a href> elements can't be followed, so they stop helping at all.
• Don't remove links to pages that need them. Every page you care about needs at least one link pointing to it (see check 46).

On your platform

• WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: the menu and footer editors control most of the count. Trim them there, once, and every page benefits.
• Next.js: keep the navigation in one component, so trimming it fixes every page.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Link best practices (updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.