What is anchor text?

Anchor text, explained

In <a href="/pricing">See pricing</a>, the anchor text is "See pricing". It's a small thing with a long history: from the start, search engines have used the words people link with to understand what a page is about, sometimes more than the page's own words.

Google's link guidance asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it's on and the page it links to. It calls out generic text like "click here" or "read more" as unhelpful, and it warns that stuffing keywords into anchor text is keyword stuffing, which is against its spam policies. For image links, the image's alt text plays the role of anchor text.

There are two sides to this. On your own site, you choose every anchor, so use the natural phrase a reader would expect: "our AI crawler checker", "how llms.txt works". Vary it naturally; you don't need the exact same keyword on every link.

For links from other sites, you usually don't choose the anchor, and that's healthy. A natural backlink profile is mostly brand names, bare URLs and plain descriptions. When a large share of your backlinks use the same commercial keyword as anchor text, it's a classic sign of bought or exchanged links. That pattern is exactly what link spam systems look for.

Anchor text also shows up in AI search. When an assistant cites a page, the surrounding text and the anchors other sites use to describe you all feed into how it understands what you do. Consistent, plain descriptions of your product help here too.

Why it matters for founders

Anchor text is the cheapest relevance signal you control. Get it right on internal links, and don't ask launch platforms, directories or partners to link to you with keyword-stuffed anchors.

Example

Instead of "To learn more, click here", write "Read our guide to choosing directories". The link now describes its target to readers and crawlers.

Common mistakes

• "Click here" and "read more" as the only anchor text on a page.
• Asking for exact-match keyword anchors in every guest post or directory listing.
• Using the same anchor for links to two different pages, which blurs which one is relevant.
• Image links with empty alt text.