edit: now that the OP has removed the code snippet that he/she posted in the original question, my reply makes no sense anymore.

Looks overly complicated to find a tags where the href matches something

foreach my $a ($root->look_down (_tag => "a", href => qr{some url matc
+h})) {
    say "Found a tag with href to ", $a->attr ("href"), " and text ", 
+$a->as_text;
    }
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and move from there

As Tux mentioned, it would be helpful to see some sample code. I can only offer some general suggestions.

I will say that it can be tricky when you are using HTML::TreeBuilder to search for "text". In the following example, the visual text that you see displayed is actually split up between different nodes.

<h2><i>Real-Life</i> Police Investigations</h2>
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This might be related to why you see different numbers of child contents. Another example is

<div id=1>
  <div id=2>
    <h2>Spring 2019 Season</h2>
      <div id=3>
      Content...
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Whenever I'm searching for text as it's displayed to the user, I definitely take advantage of the as_text() method of HTML::Element. Maybe check if you are at the deepest/shallowest level by checking if the as_text() result of the current node is the same/different as the as_text() result of the parent/child node.