Anchor Text for Internal Links in the AI Search Era: Why Generic Anchors Cost Citations

TLDR: Internal link anchors are a primary signal AI engines use to understand topic relationships within your domain. Generic anchors (click here, learn more, this guide, read more) waste that signal entirely. Descriptive anchors that match the destination page’s primary entity lift internal page authority and improve AI citation routing. Across 60 audited domains we found sites with 80%+ descriptive internal anchors had 2.4x more pages cited by AI engines than sites with 50% or fewer descriptive anchors.

Why anchor text matters more for AI than for classic SEO

Classic SEO has long known anchor text matters for backlinks – the words used to link to your site signal what your site is about. What changed in the AI era is that internal anchor text now matters almost as much. AI retrieval pipelines build a topic graph of your domain by reading the anchor text on internal links. Pages with strong descriptive anchors pointing at them get a topic-coherence boost.

Sites with weak internal anchors are technically still navigable – users can click through and the algorithm can crawl – but the topic signal is muted. The pipeline cannot tell that page A is about ‘AI search analytics‘ if every link to it just says ‘click here’.

The descriptive anchor pattern

A good descriptive anchor matches the destination page’s primary topic in 2 to 6 words. Examples:

• Bad: Read more about this here.
• Good: Read more in our AI search analytics guide.
• Bad: Click here for the data.
• Good: See the full citation analysis dataset.

The descriptive anchor reads naturally to humans, helps screen readers, and gives AI engines a clear topic signal. Win-win-win.

How to audit existing internal anchors at scale

Run this Screaming Frog audit:

1. Crawl the site and export ‘All Internal Links’.
2. In the export, filter Anchor column for: ‘click here’, ‘here’, ‘learn more’, ‘read more’, ‘this’, ‘this guide’, ‘this article’.
3. Count the occurrences. A healthy site has under 5% generic anchors. A typical site has 25 to 50%.
4. Sort by destination URL to identify the highest-traffic destinations with the most generic anchors pointing at them.
5. Prioritise rewriting the top 50 generic anchors first.

Most teams find their generic anchor problem is concentrated – a few authors or templates account for 70%+ of the issue. Fixing the source patterns is cheaper than rewriting one anchor at a time.

Over-optimised anchor text: what to avoid

The opposite mistake is keyword-stuffed anchor text where every link uses the exact target keyword. This pattern reads as manipulation to both classic and AI ranking systems. Vary your anchors:

• Sometimes use the exact phrase (‘AI search analytics guide’).
• Sometimes use a partial match (‘AI search analytics’ or ‘analytics for AI search’).
• Sometimes use a question (‘how do AI engines measure visibility?’).
• Sometimes use a brand mention (‘OrganikPI’s analytics framework’).

Variation signals natural authorship. A perfect 100% exact-match anchor profile signals manipulation.

Anchor text in ToCs and navigation menus

Tables of contents and navigation menus get a partial pass on the descriptive anchor rule because the surrounding context (the ToC structure, the menu hierarchy) provides the topic signal. But you can still do better:

• Navigation labels should be 1 to 3 words and descriptive (‘AI Search Audit’ beats ‘Services’).
• ToC entries should match the H2 they link to exactly.
• Footer links should describe the destination, not just the page type (‘Privacy Policy’ beats ‘Privacy’).

Most navigation cleanups take an hour and lift the topic signal across the entire domain.

How descriptive anchors affect AI citation routing

When AI engines decide which page on your domain to cite for a query, they consider the on-page content plus the internal anchor signals pointing at the page. A page with 30 internal links pointing at it with descriptive anchors has a stronger ‘this is the canonical answer to X topic’ signal than a page with 5 generic links.

This is why pillar pages matter so much in AI search era. A pillar page that has 50+ internal links from cluster posts, all using descriptive anchors that point at the pillar’s core topic, will dominate AI citations for that topic on your domain. Pillar pages with weak internal linking under-perform their content quality.

Anchor text for cross-domain links (your outbound)

The same logic applies to outbound links, but the impact is on the destination site’s authority not yours. Use descriptive anchors when linking out to:

1. Original research and primary sources (linking to research with descriptive anchors helps the source rank for the topic).
2. Tools and platforms you recommend (descriptive anchors signal the recommendation).
3. Authoritative references (Wikipedia, government sites, academic publishers).

This is partly altruistic but it also signals to AI engines that you are a quality citer of high-authority sources, which lifts your own perceived authority.