Anchor text — the visible, clickable words in a link — is one of the strongest signals you give both search engines and AI about what the linked page is about. Descriptive anchors like "guide to reducing server response time" tell a machine exactly what sits on the other end; vague anchors like "click here" or "read more" tell it nothing. Because AI systems and crawlers use anchor text to understand relationships between pages and to judge relevance, writing better link text is one of the cheapest, highest-return on-page improvements you can make — and most sites still get it wrong.
What anchor text signals to machines
When a crawler or an AI model encounters a link, the anchor text acts as a short label describing the destination. It helps the machine predict the linked page's topic before fetching it, weighs into how relevant that page is judged for a query, and — for AI retrieval — helps establish the semantic connection between two pieces of content. A page that is consistently linked with anchors like "INP optimization" is understood to be about INP, even by systems that have not yet crawled it. That is why anchor text is effectively a vote not just for a page but for what that page is about.
The classic failure is the "click here" link. It is invisible to this signal: a machine reading "click here" learns nothing about the destination, and neither does a screen-reader user navigating by a list of links. Descriptive anchor text fixes both problems at once, which is why it sits at the intersection of SEO, accessibility, and AI readability. The same principle drives how you structure links across your site, covered in our internal linking strategy for SEO and AI.
How to write anchor text that works
- Describe the destination, not the action. Prefer "our Core Web Vitals guide" over "click here." The reader — human or machine — should know where the link goes without the surrounding sentence.
- Keep it concise but specific. A few descriptive words beat both a single generic word and a whole sentence wrapped in a link. Aim for the natural noun phrase a person would use to name the topic.
- Use natural language, not keyword stuffing. Anchors should read like something a human wrote. Exact-match keyword anchors repeated at scale look manipulative and can trigger over-optimization signals.
- Vary your anchors naturally. Linking to the same page from different contexts with slightly different descriptive phrasing is normal and healthy; forcing the identical keyword anchor every time is not.
- Make the linked words meaningful on their own. Links are often surfaced out of context — in a link list, a screen reader, or an AI's extraction — so the anchor must stand alone.
Internal vs external anchors, and the over-optimization trap
For internal links, you have full control and should use it deliberately: descriptive anchors reinforce which of your pages is the authority on a topic, helping both crawlers and AI build an accurate map of your site. This is how you signal topical structure, complementing the machine-readable hierarchy you create with semantic HTML and heading structure. Consistency helps here — if three pages link to your INP article, descriptive anchors that all clearly point at "INP" tell the system that page is your definitive INP resource.
For external and inbound links, the calculus flips. You do not control how other sites link to you, and that is fine — natural inbound anchor text is varied and includes plenty of brand names and generic phrases. The danger is manufacturing inbound links with identical commercial keyword anchors, which is a well-known spam pattern. Aggressive exact-match anchor text at scale is more likely to hurt than help. The healthiest inbound anchor profile is the one that looks like it happened naturally, because it did.
Anchor text, accessibility and AI extraction
Descriptive anchors pay off three ways simultaneously. Search engines get a clearer relevance signal. Screen-reader users, who often navigate by pulling up a list of every link on a page, get link text that makes sense stripped of context — a direct accessibility win. And AI systems that extract and follow links to build answers get a cleaner understanding of what each destination offers. The same discipline that helps machines read your images with good alt text applies to links: write the text as if the label is all the reader gets, because sometimes it is.
Fixing anchor text is low-risk, high-return work you can do without touching your site's architecture — a find-and-improve pass on "click here," "read more," and bare-URL links across your top pages. To spot the vague anchors, broken links, and internal-linking gaps quietly weakening your on-page signals, run the free CheckMy.site scanner and see how machines are reading the connections between your pages.