anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. the reason search engines care is worth stating precisely, because it explains everything else about how the signal behaves: anchor text is a description of your page written by someone else. your title tag is what you claim the page is. an anchor is what an independent party said it was. that independence is the source of its weight, and it is also why trying to control it at scale is treated as a scheme.
you control almost none of your external anchor text and all of your internal anchor text. the second half is free, unlimited, carries no risk, and is where nearly all the available upside actually sits.
the kinds, and what each one says
<a href="/pricing">pricing</a> exact / partial match <a href="/pricing">CrawlGraph</a> branded <a href="/pricing">https://crawlgraph.com/pricing</a> naked url <a href="/pricing">here</a> generic <- says nothing <a href="/pricing">see what it costs</a> natural phrase <img src="..." alt="CrawlGraph pricing"> image: alt IS the anchor
the one to notice is the last two. a generic anchor like "click here" or "read more" passes a link and communicates nothing about the destination, which wastes the only part of the link that carries meaning. and an image link's alt attribute is its anchor text, which means an image link with an empty alt is a generic anchor with worse accessibility.
what a natural profile looks like
there is no safe percentage. anyone who quotes you one made it up, because no vendor publishes a threshold and the answer differs by subject and by how a site is normally discussed. what you can reason about is the shape.
when real editors link to something, they use whatever fits their sentence: the brand name, the page title, the name of the thing, a bare URL, an ordinary phrase. across many independent writers that produces variety, because independent people do not coordinate. so the pattern that looks engineered is not any single anchor, it is uniformity: a large share of inbound links using the identical money phrase. no group of unconnected writers converges on one wording by accident, which is precisely why the pattern is detectable.
the practical consequence is reassuring. you do not need to manage a distribution. you need to not manufacture one.
internal anchors: the half you own
this is where the advice turns actionable, so here is a worked example from this site rather than a hypothetical. auditing our own internal links on 10 september 2026, we found eight vendor comparison pages all cross-linking each other with nothing but the brand name as the anchor:
BEFORE eight vendor pages cross-linking each other <a href="/free-spyfu-alternative">SpyFu</a> meaning conveyed: "there is a company called SpyFu" AFTER the anchor names the destination <a href="/free-spyfu-alternative">tools like SpyFu</a> <a href="/free-serpstat-alternative">alternatives to Serpstat</a> <a href="/free-moz-alternative">Moz competitors</a> meaning conveyed: what the target page is FOR rotated on purpose. eight identical exact-match anchors is a pattern; three phrasings across a cluster is an editor.
the old anchor told a search engine that a company called SpyFu exists, which it already knew. it said nothing about whether the destination was a review, a price comparison, or an alternatives page. the pages were competing for phrases like "tools like spyfu" while every internal link pointing at them described them as "SpyFu".
note the rotation in the fixed version. eight identical exact-match internal anchors is itself a pattern; three natural phrasings across a cluster reads like an editor writing sentences. the goal is to be descriptive, not to be uniform in a new direction.
anchors as a cannibalization fix
the strongest use of internal anchor text is not ranking a page, it is telling a search engine which of your pages owns a topic when two of them could plausibly answer it. move the contested phrases out of the losing page's body prose and into the anchor of a link pointing at the page that should win. the phrase still appears, but now it describes a destination instead of staking a claim.
that technique, and how to find the splits worth applying it to, is in finding keyword cannibalization in search console.
why some tools cannot show you anchor text
anchor text lives in the HTML of the linking page, so only a tool that crawls and stores pages can report it. that has a consequence worth knowing before you compare tools on this feature.
domain-level web graphs, including the open common crawl hyperlink graph that this site runs on, record that one domain links to another. they do not carry the anchor text of individual links. so we can tell you who links to a competitor and not to you, and we cannot tell you what words they used. that is a real limitation and we would rather say it than let a comparison table imply otherwise. if anchor-text reporting on external links is the job you need done, a page-level commercial index is the right tool and we are not it.
describe the destination, never "here". give image links a real alt. vary your phrasing across a cluster instead of repeating one anchor. never buy exact-match anchors. and spend your attention on internal links, because that is the half you actually control.
faq
What is anchor text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink. It matters to search engines because it is a description of the destination written by someone other than the destination's owner, which makes it one of the few independent descriptions of a page available on the open web. That independence is exactly why it carries weight and why manipulating it at scale is treated as a link scheme.
What is a good anchor text distribution?
A natural one, which mostly means varied and mostly not exact-match. Real editors link with brand names, bare URLs, the page title, and ordinary phrases like the name of the thing being discussed. A profile where a large share of inbound links use the identical money phrase is the pattern that looks engineered, because no group of independent writers converges on one wording by accident. There is no safe percentage to quote, and anyone quoting one invented it.
Does anchor text still matter for SEO?
Yes, and it matters most in the place people ignore: internal links, where you control every anchor on the site. External anchor text is largely out of your hands and attempts to control it are what get sites into trouble. Internal anchor text is free, fully within your control, and is one of the strongest signals you can send about what a page is for.
What is exact match anchor text?
Exact match anchor text is a link whose visible text is precisely the phrase the destination wants to rank for. A small number of these arising naturally is unremarkable. Deliberately building many of them is one of the oldest and most recognisable link-scheme patterns, and the risk is not worth the diminishing benefit.
Can I see the anchor text of my backlinks?
Only from tools that crawl and store pages, because anchor text lives in the page HTML. Domain-level web graphs, including the open Common Crawl hyperlink graph, record which domain links to which but do not carry the anchor text of individual links, so a tool built on that layer can tell you who links to you but not what words they used.
writes the queries we run internally. ships one tactical post a week.
plus one when a new common crawl release lands. that is all.