# What is URL structure?

URL structure is the way a site's web addresses are formatted and organized, including the folder path, the slug, and any parameters. Clear, stable, descriptive URLs aid crawling, consolidation, and human comprehension.

## How it works

Good URLs are readable, lowercase, hyphen-separated, and reflect the site hierarchy (for example, a glossary term living under a clear glossary path). They stay stable over time, because changing a URL means redirecting and re-earning its signals.

Parameters for tracking, sorting, and sessions are where structure goes wrong, spawning duplicate URLs that need canonicalization or blocking.

## URL structure vs canonicalization

URL structure is about designing clean addresses in the first place; canonicalization is the cleanup when multiple addresses serve the same content anyway. Strong structure reduces how much canonicalization you need, but parameters and variants mean you almost always need both.

## Why it matters for B2B

A descriptive URL is itself a citation signal: when an AI engine names a source, a clean path like /glossary/canonicalization communicates the topic at a glance, to both the engine and the human reading the answer. You mentioned you will set the URL path for this glossary at deploy time; a clear, consistent, hierarchy-reflecting pattern is the choice that ages best and reads most authoritatively in a cited answer.

**Common mistake**

Shipping URLs with session IDs, tracking parameters, and mixed case. Each variant looks like a separate URL to a crawler and splits signals; keep URLs lowercase, stable, readable, and free of needless parameters.

*Source: https://rawmktg.com/glossary/url-structure · rawmktg. by Vinayak Ravi*