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The words you click. Write them so they describe what waits on the other side — "our pricing page," not "click here." It helps readers and every machine reading your site. When others link to you, expect their wording to vary.
— Janus, at the door
Glossary

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link — the part a reader sees and decides whether to follow. In a sentence like “book a dental checkup in Basel,” the anchor text is the phrase carrying the link, not the address hidden behind it.

It matters because it describes the destination in advance. A link labelled “sourdough starter guide” tells a search engine, an AI assistant and a human being what to expect on the other side. A link labelled “click here” tells all three of them nothing, and the reader who relies on a screen reader least of all.

Machines also read a website partly through its links. The words you use to point from one page to another are one of the ways an AI works out what the destination is about and how your pages relate to each other. It is a small signal, but a repeated one: pointing at your services page with the words our physiotherapy services, again and again from relevant places, quietly reinforces what that page is for. Vague wording throws the signal away and leaves the machine to guess from weaker clues.

It usually goes wrong through habit rather than malice. Years of design convention trained everyone to write click here and read more, because a human eye fills in the meaning from the layout around it. The opposite failure is stuffing links with keywords until the sentence reads unnaturally, which helps no one and looks manipulative besides. The middle path is to write the link the way you would describe the destination to someone out loud — name the thing it leads to, in plain words, inside a sentence that already makes sense.

All of that concerns the anchor text you control. The anchor text you do not control is what other sites choose when they link to you, and that variety is the point: natural linking produces a mixture of your business name, your page titles, plain addresses and ordinary phrases. Uniform, keyword-stuffed wording arriving from many sites at once is the oldest signature of purchased links, and one of the easiest for a search engine to recognise.