Hyperlink

A hyperlink, in everyday language just a link, is a clickable element that sends the user on to another page or resource. It can sit on text, images or buttons, and the clickable text is called the anchor text. Hyperlinks are the infrastructure of the web: without them the internet would be a collection of unconnected documents.

Links come in three kinds. Internal links connect pages on one site and help both users and search engines find their way around. Outbound links point from the site out to others, and used with care they show that the content rests on real sources. Links from other sites in to you, backlinks, work as recommendations and count among the heaviest authority signals there are.

The hyperlink has been central to SEO since Google built its original algorithm, PageRank, on the idea of links as votes: the more credible pages point at a page, the more trust it deserves. The mechanism works in several layers: crawlers find new pages by following links, the anchor text gives the search engine context about the receiving page, and the link profile as a whole shapes the authority of the site.

AI search has not rewritten any of that. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews find their sources through the same links and cite them with ordinary hyperlinks. Putting links to work inside a site is the subject of the guide to internal link building.