Flatten any tree to 3 clicks — the audit play

Flatten any tree to 3 clicks — the audit play
Client buried money pages 6 folders deep. Nobody found them, Google barely crawled them. The flatten:
— Pull every URL, count the slashes in the path. Anything past /a/b/c/ is a flag
— Sort by depth, grab the top 50 deepest that have traffic or revenue
— For each: can it live one level up? Move it, 301 the old path
— Add a hub link from the nearest category so depth drops in the link graph too
— Re-crawl, confirm click-depth dropped (Screaming Frog shows it as 'Crawl Depth')
Got the worst offenders from 6 clicks to 2. Crawl rate on those folders tripled.
Don't move URLs with backlinks without checking the redirect lands clean — one hop, no chains.