Hop count in SEO refers to the number of redirect steps a request must traverse before reaching its final destination URL. A single 301 redirect is one hop; a chain of three redirects accumulating before the final page is served has a hop count of three. The metric matters because each additional hop consumes crawl budget, adds round-trip latency — typically 100–300ms per hop — and is thought to reduce the amount of link equity transferred. Google has not published a hard limit on acceptable hop counts, but industry testing and patent literature suggest that chains beyond three to five hops risk incomplete crawling, particularly for less-authoritative sites that receive infrequent Googlebot visits. In performance audits, hop count is often reported alongside time-to-first-byte to quantify the combined user and crawler impact of redirect inefficiency.