What Is Anchor Text?
Short answer
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. Search engines and AI systems use it to work out what the linked page is about, so a link that says "SEO audit checklist" tells them far more than one that says "click here."
Anchor Text explained
Anchor text is the part of a link you can click. In the HTML it sits between the opening and closing <a> tags. Google has used it as a relevance signal from the start: Brin and Page's 1998 paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, describes attaching link text to the page it points to, because the words people use to link to a page often describe it better than the page does.
Types of anchor text
- Exact match: the target keyword and nothing else ("anchor text")
- Partial match: the keyword plus other words ("how anchor text affects rankings")
- Branded: a company or product name ("Tarun Gehani Consulting")
- Naked URL: the address itself ("tarungehani.com/glossary")
- Generic: words that describe nothing ("click here," "read more," "this post")
- Image: for an image link, Google reads the image's alt text as the anchor
A natural backlink profile mixes all of these. You don't control the anchors other sites use, but you choose every anchor on your own site.
What Google recommends
Google's link best practices ask for anchor text that's descriptive, reasonably short, and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to. The same page warns against stuffing keywords into links and against chaining several links side by side so readers can't tell them apart. Google's Penguin update in 2012 targeted sites with unnatural, keyword-heavy anchor patterns, and that scrutiny never went away.
Anchor text and AI search
When an AI system retrieves a passage from your page, the anchor text inside it comes along as part of the text it reads. A descriptive anchor helps the system connect a claim to its source and judge whether the linked page is worth fetching. Since you control every internal anchor, fixing them is one of the cheapest AI visibility improvements a site can make.
How to check your own anchors
- Crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog and export every internal link with its anchor text.
- Filter for generic anchors: "click here," "learn more," "read more," "here."
- Rewrite each one to name what the destination page covers.
- For your most important pages, make sure several internal links point to them with varied, descriptive anchors.
In practice
When I review sites, the anchor problem I find most often is wasted internal links, more than spammy backlinks. I regularly find sites where half the internal links say "click here" or "learn more." It's one of the fastest audit wins, because you control every one of those links and can change them this week.
Common misconception
A common belief is that more exact-match anchors mean higher rankings. Natural link profiles are varied, and dozens of identical keyword anchors pointing at one page look manipulated. That's the pattern Penguin was built to catch.
Sources
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