Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink, the words that stand out in color or underlining. In the link "see our price list", the anchor text is those four words, and search engines read them as a description of the page the link points to.

That description is the whole mechanism. When pages across the web link to you with the words "accounting software", the anchor text tells Google what the target page is about and strengthens your relevance for that topic. The industry sorts anchors into four types: branded ("Bonzer"), generic ("read more here"), descriptive ("guide to keyword research") and exact match, where the anchor is identical to the keyword the target page is built to rank for.

The real distinction sits between the links you control and the ones you do not. Internal anchors are yours to write. In backlinks from other sites the publisher decides the wording, and a healthy profile is dominated by branded and descriptive anchors with genuine variation. A profile where a striking share is exact match has been one of the clearest spam signals in SEO since Google's Penguin update, and the logic still holds.

The language models behind AI search read link text much the same way: the words others use about you shape which topics a model connects to your brand. Anchors are one of the few link signals a company shapes deliberately, and the guide to anchor text strategy works through the choices.