diff --git a/crawl4ai/utils.py b/crawl4ai/utils.py
index 5b8af794..fe725317 100644
--- a/crawl4ai/utils.py
+++ b/crawl4ai/utils.py
@@ -1958,6 +1958,10 @@ def normalize_url(href, base_url):
     if not parsed_base.scheme or not parsed_base.netloc:
         raise ValueError(f"Invalid base URL format: {base_url}")
 
+    # Ensure base_url ends with a trailing slash if it's a directory path
+    if not base_url.endswith('/'):
+        base_url = base_url + '/'
+
     # Use urljoin to handle all cases
     normalized = urljoin(base_url, href.strip())
     return normalized