Anchor text: what it is, the main types and how to get it right.

Every link makes a small promise. The words a visitor clicks tell them what they are about to get, and the same words tell Google what the page behind the link is about. Those clickable words are the anchor text. On most websites they are either wasted on “read more” or packed with so many keywords that they read awkwardly and look engineered. Both leave value on the table, and the second can put a site at risk.

This guide explains what anchor text is, how Google uses it, which types exist and what a natural anchor text profile looks like. It also covers why link text matters for accessibility and for AI answers, and how to audit your own. It is built on Google Search Central’s documentation, the W3C’s accessibility guidelines and what we see when we audit sites. The HTML side of links (the anchor element, the href attribute and rel values) has its own article: our guide to crawlable links and a href SEO.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. Link text and link label mean the same thing. Google describes it as text that tells people and Google something about the page you are linking to, which is why it shapes how Google understands that destination.

In HTML, the anchor text sits between the opening and closing tags of the a element:

<a href="https://viralistic.nl/seo">our SEO approach</a>

Here, “our SEO approach” is the anchor text and the URL in the href attribute is the destination. The name comes from the a element itself, which HTML calls the anchor element: it anchors a piece of text to another place on the web.

On a desktop, hovering over a link shows its URL in a corner of the browser. On a phone there is no hover, so the anchor text is often the only clue a reader gets before tapping.

Anchor text is not the same as an anchor link. An anchor link (also called a jump link) takes you to a section of the same page, for example with #pricing at the end of the URL. That link has anchor text too, but the term anchor link describes the destination, not the words.

Some links have no visible text at all, such as a linked logo or photo. In that case Google uses the image’s alt text as the anchor text. If a link is completely empty, Google can fall back on the title attribute. Do not rely on that. An empty link tells your visitor as little as it tells Google.

How does Google use link text?

Google treats anchor text as a clue about the page a link points to. The idea is as old as Google. In the 1998 paper in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page described their search engine, they associated the text of a link not only with the page the link sits on, but also with the page it points to. Their reasoning was simple: the words other people use to refer to a page often describe it more accurately than the page describes itself.

A famous example showed how strong that signal was. Countless websites told visitors to “click here” to download Adobe Reader, the program people needed to open PDFs, and linked those two words to Adobe’s download page. In early 2007, readers of Google engineer Matt Cutts’s blog pointed out that the Adobe page ranked first for “click here”, even though the phrase did not appear on it. Cutts replied on that post that it was a borderline case, adding that Adobe presumably did not mind showing up. The same mechanism made Google bombs possible: pranks in which many people linked to a page with the same words until it ranked for a phrase it had nothing to do with. In January 2007 Google changed its algorithm to reduce their impact.

Today anchor text is one signal among many. Google’s link best practices say that links help Google judge the relevance of pages and discover new ones, and that better anchor text makes it easier for people and Google to understand what the linked page is about. Google also stresses the sentence around the link: the words before and after a link matter. A link inside a sentence that explains the destination carries more meaning than a lone link in a row of others.

Google also understands synonyms and meaning, so anchor text does not need to contain your exact keyword to work. “How to earn backlinks” makes it clear that a page is about link building without using the phrase, and it reads better.

Types of anchor text, with examples

SEO practitioners group anchor text into a handful of types. These names are industry shorthand, not official Google categories, but they make it easier to read a link profile. To keep it concrete, here is one real page: our guide to link building, whose main keyword is “link building”. These are the ways another site might link to it:

None of these types is forbidden. A naked URL in a list of sources is perfectly normal, and a brand name is the most logical text for a link to a home page. What matters is the right type in the right place, and the overall balance across all your links. More on that below.

Two types deserve a closer look. Generic anchors such as “click here” break no rule, but they waste the link: Google uses them as its own examples of anchor text that is too generic. In a button with clear context, such as “Book a call” under a paragraph about an introductory meeting, a short action label works fine. In running text it does not. And for images: a linked logo or photo without alt text is a link without words, for Google, for screen readers and for anyone whose images fail to load.

Internal vs external links: who picks the words?

With internal links you choose every word, and that is usually where the biggest gains are. Google writes that paying more attention to the anchor text of internal links helps people and Google make sense of your site, and that every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. It is where we start in our SEO work: the pages that bring in clients get links from related articles, with text that says what the reader will find there.

Internally, your keyword can appear in the link text more often, as long as it reads naturally. You are describing your own page, which is exactly what Google asks for. The risk lies in cramming, not in naming. Google suggests a simple test: does the reader need these keywords to understand the next page? If it feels like you are forcing them in, it is probably too much.

Keep it consistent, too. Links to the same destination, such as your main navigation, should use the same text on every page. Links to different destinations should use different text. Two links labelled “our approach” that lead to two different pages confuse your visitor and tell Google nothing about how those pages differ.

With external links, the backlinks other sites point at you, you usually do not choose the words. An editor links with your company name, your domain, the title of your page or a phrase from their own sentence. That is not a problem. It is what a natural link profile looks like. What you can influence is what people copy: a clear page title and H1, a recognisable brand name and content worth citing. If you earn a mention or write a guest contribution, ask at most for a link that is accurate. Never ask for a specific keyword. How to earn those links is covered in our link building guide for premium brands.

For the links you place to other sites, the same rules apply. Name the source in the link text, for example “Google’s link best practices” instead of “here”. Your reader then knows they are leaving your site, and for where.

What does a natural link profile look like?

In a natural anchor text profile, brand names, naked URLs, page titles and descriptive phrases dominate, because that is how people link. Your profile is the distribution of all the link texts other sites use to link to you. An over-optimised profile has a striking number of external links with the same commercial keyword. That pattern rarely arises on its own, which is why it stands out.

Google has acted against such patterns for years. In April 2012 it launched the update that became known as Penguin, aimed at webspam tactics such as keyword stuffing and link schemes. Google never disclosed exactly which signals Penguin used. Since September 2016 Penguin runs in real time as part of Google’s core algorithm, and according to Google it now devalues spam by adjusting rankings based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site. In December 2022 Google added a link spam update that uses SpamBrain, its AI-based spam prevention system, to neutralise the impact of unnatural links.

Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. The examples include keyword-rich links embedded in widgets that are distributed across many sites, and widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites. Google illustrates it with a short comment signed by “Paul”, followed by three links: “paul’s pizza”, “san diego pizza” and “best pizza san diego”. That is what an anchor text profile looks like when someone has built it by hand.

You will find fixed ratios online, such as a maximum percentage for exact-match anchors. Google publishes no such numbers. They come from SEO tools and agencies and are rules of thumb at best. To show how large the difference can be anyway, here are two made-up sites, each with links from 50 referring domains. On the first, 20 domains link with the brand name, 9 with the naked URL, 10 with a description, 5 with a generic phrase, 3 with the exact keyword and 3 through an image. On the second, 29 of the 50 domains use the same exact-match keyword.

The first profile resembles what happens when people link to you of their own accord. The second tells a different story: somebody chose those words, usually through bought or swapped links. To see where your own profile stands, count which text each referring domain uses. Ahrefs’ Anchors report shows those counts per domain, and Search Console shows the link texts themselves. The defaults below reproduce the varied example.

If the result looks lopsided, do not panic. Google says it typically ignores links from known spam sites already. Do not buy fake branded mentions to “dilute” the percentage either: that is another built profile. Find out where the links come from, have the worst removed where you can, and invest in links you earn. When the disavow tool does make sense is explained in the link building guide mentioned above.

How to write good anchor text

Good anchor text, in Google’s words, is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page it is on and the page it links to. In practice it works best in a fixed order. Write your sentence first, without thinking about the link. Then pick the few words that best summarise the destination and link only those. Finally, read the anchor text on its own. If you know where it goes without the rest of the sentence, it is good.

Use your reader’s words, not your keyword list’s. A client searches for “how much does a website cost”, not “website design cost cheap best agency”. Link the core phrase rather than a whole sentence: Google itself shows that a link stretched over a long sentence is less clear than a link on the words that matter. And do not chain links next to each other. Each link loses the context of its sentence, and readers struggle to tell them apart.

Adding anchor text is the same in almost every editor. In WordPress, Webflow or a headless CMS, you select the words, click the link icon and paste the URL. The hard part is never the button. It is choosing which words to select.

Anchor text and accessibility (WCAG)

Good anchor text is also an accessibility requirement. Success Criterion 2.4.4 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Link Purpose (In Context), sits at the basic level A. It requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone, or from the link text together with its programmatically determined context, such as the sentence or list item it sits in. The stricter criterion 2.4.9, at level AAA, asks that the link text alone is enough.

The reason is practical. According to the W3C, assistive technology such as a screen reader can present all the links on a page as a list. Someone navigating that way hears “read more” ten times and has to go back into the text to work out what each one does. The W3C also lists a linked image without an accessible name as a failure of this criterion. And if you must use vague link text, put the explanation before it in the sentence rather than after.

This is where SEO and accessibility pull in the same direction. Link text that helps a blind visitor helps Google too, and the reverse is just as true. The W3C even recommends the same consistency mentioned above: the same text for the same destination, different text for different destinations. And make sure readers can see that the words are a link at all. WCAG’s Use of Color criterion (1.4.1) means colour should not be the only thing that sets a link apart, which is why an underline still earns its place.

Does anchor text matter for AI search?

Yes. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, anchor text works through the same systems as classic search results. In its guide to generative AI features in Search, Google writes that these features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems. They retrieve pages from the Search index and ground their answers in them. A page that Google understands well, partly through clear links, is a better candidate to appear as a source.

Manipulation fails there just as it does in classic search. Google’s spam policies explicitly include attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search. In the same AI guide, Google says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem, because its generative AI features depend on both its ranking systems and the systems that block spam. Buying “AI mentions” is the same idea as buying anchor text a decade ago, with the same risk attached.

There is one more reason to take link text seriously. Google describes how AI agents in a browser can access a website by analysing screenshots, inspecting the page structure and interpreting the accessibility tree. In that tree, a link’s name is usually its anchor text. An agent completing a task for someone gets as little from “click here” as a screen reader does. Other AI crawlers are less capable than Googlebot and often do not run JavaScript, so a link that only appears after a script runs may not exist for them. Our article on crawlable links explains how to avoid that.

Finally, a line of reasoning rather than a measurement. Language models read text. The words others use to link to you, and the sentences around those links, shape how your brand is described across the web. If your name keeps appearing in the context of one speciality, that is the picture that sticks. How visibility in Google and in AI answers fit together is the subject of our article on GEO services and AI visibility.

How do you check your anchor text?

Combine Google’s own data with one tool that crawls your site. Search Console shows how other sites link to you, a crawler shows how you link to yourself, and no single tool sees everything.

Google gives two purposes for its link text report: confirm that the text is what you expect and not spammy, and confirm that other sites describe your site accurately. If they do not, Google suggests you might need to clarify your own content. That makes the report a useful mirror. If everyone links with the name of one service while you offer five, it says something about how clearly your offer comes across.

Our guide on how to use Ahrefs walks through the Anchors report and Site Audit. Then work through these questions:

• Is the top of your external link text mostly your brand name, page titles and descriptions?
• Does one commercial keyword appear strikingly often in external links? Then find out where those links come from.
• Do your most important pages get internal links in running text, with words that say what the reader will find?
• Are there generic or empty links on your site, such as “read more” or linked images without alt text?
• Does the same link text point to different pages?
• Are there links to your site in footers, widgets or templates that you have spread across other sites?

How we help

At Viralistic, anchor text is part of our SEO approach, not a separate task. The principle is the same one this guide started with: the words of a link should describe its destination, for readers first and for Google and AI systems as a result. We start with your positioning: which pages should bring in clients, and which words do those clients use? Then we read your links with Search Console and Ahrefs, rewrite internal link text where it leaves value on the table and make sure every important page is linked from the places readers need it. A person reviews every change, including when AI helped with the first draft. Our guide to SEO optimisation shows how links fit into the rest of the technical foundation.

We do not steer external anchors with bought links. We create content worth citing, so others link to you on their own, in their own words. And we will tell you honestly when the problem lies elsewhere. If nobody links with the words you expect, the cause is often an unclear message, not the links.

SEO at Viralistic starts at a few hundred euros per month for a focused programme and grows with scope. Book a call if you want to know where your link profile stands.

Frequently asked questions

What is anchor text in SEO?

In SEO, anchor text is the clickable text of a link, read as a signal about the page it points to. Google combines it with the words around the link to understand the destination. Descriptive anchors on internal links help readers and Google navigate your site. Many identical keyword anchors on backlinks, by contrast, count as link spam.

What is an example of anchor text?

In the link “read our guide to technical SEO”, the clickable words “guide to technical SEO” are the anchor text. Other examples are a brand name such as “Viralistic”, a naked URL such as “viralistic.nl”, a generic phrase such as “click here” and the alt text of a linked image. Each type sends a different signal about the destination.

What is the difference between anchor text and an anchor link?

Anchor text is the clickable wording of any link. An anchor link, or jump link, takes you to a specific section of a page and is recognisable by a hash in the URL, such as #contact. An anchor link has anchor text of its own: one term describes the destination, the other the words.

Is there an ideal anchor text ratio?

No. Google publishes no percentages for branded, exact-match or any other type of anchor text. The ratios you find online come from SEO tools and agencies. A natural profile usually consists mostly of brand names, URLs, page titles and descriptions, because that is how people link. Do not try to engineer the ratio. Earn links, and the distribution follows.

How long should anchor text be?

There is no hard limit. Google asks for descriptive, reasonably concise link text and shows that a link stretched over a whole sentence is less clear than a link on its core words. In practice, a few words up to a short phrase work best: long enough to describe the destination, short enough to read at a glance.

Does Google only count the first link to the same page?

Google has never documented such a rule. Older SEO tests suggested that only the first anchor text counts when a page links to the same URL several times, and Google’s John Mueller has cautioned against assuming that. The practical answer: make the first link to a page the descriptive one, and skip duplicate links that add nothing.

Can I ask a website to change the anchor text of a backlink?

You can ask, but the site owner decides. If a link text is genuinely wrong, for example an old company name or the wrong service, a polite request is fine. Never ask for your exact-match keyword. Google calls links created primarily to manipulate rankings link spam, and a stack of identical commercial anchors is easy to spot.

What is an anchor text in teaching?

In education, an anchor text is something else: the central, complex text a lesson or unit is built around, such as a novel that related poems and articles are paired with. Teachers in English language arts use the term. It has nothing to do with links, although the idea of one text holding others in place is similar.