Google Search Central: faceted navigation creates combinatorial duplicate URLs; not search-friendly by default

Quote (Google Search Central, formal guidance):

"Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color or price range, can be helpful for your visitors, but it's often not search-friendly since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content."

Companion quote:

"Crawling faceted URLs tends to cost sites large amounts of computing resources due to the sheer amount of URLs and operations needed to render those pages."

Source: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/faceted-navigation

Confidence: Verified (primary Google documentation).

Implication for multi-vertical IA: A /services/<service>/<vertical>/ matrix URL pattern (e.g., /services/delivery/agriculture/) is functionally faceted navigation. With 4 services × 4 verticals = 16 pages, fine. With 6 × 6 = 36 plus the canonical hub pages, the duplicate-content risk and crawl-budget cost become real. See [[url-pattern-d-matrix-services-vertical]] and Mueller's Mueller on near-duplicate vertical/location pages: fold them into one stronger page unless each has something unique.