Anchor text is the page tag you give AI for free, but most websites waste it on "click here" and "learn more". When the search model reads an empty anchor, it can only guess what the page pointed to by the link is about, and the chance of it guessing wrong is higher than you think. Writing the anchor point into a description that can be understood without context is one of the things with the highest return rate among internal links, but the least people do it seriously.
Why does the AI engine especially eat anchor text?
Let’s explain the mechanism first. Before answering, LLM-driven search (AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT search) will cut the web page into paragraph-level blocks, convert them into vectors, and then select candidate fragments based on semantic similarity to generate answers. Anchor text is one of the few phrases that is shared by both pages - it appears in the context of the source page and is also used as a description of the target page. You are equivalent to using one sentence and marking "where does this link come from and what topic it points to".
This is the difference from traditional SEO. In the past, we cared about anchor points because they affected weight transfer and keyword association; in the GEO context, anchor points have an additional role. When the user asks "What items does the GEO audit include?", the model must select the paragraph that is most likely to be the answer from a bunch of candidate paragraphs. An internal link that reads "Our GEO audit process and delivery projects" is equivalent to directly telling the model: This page is answering this entity. Hollow anchors cannot provide this signal.
What is a descriptive anchor point: understand where to go at a glance
There is only one criterion: if the anchor text is extracted separately and separated from the context, whether the reader and model can still deduce the theme connecting the target. If it can be done, it is a descriptive anchor point; if it cannot be done, it is an invalid anchor point.
- Invalid: "Click here", "Learn more", "This article", "Official website" - I pulled it out and have no idea where to go.
- Reluctantly: "GEO Services" - There is a theme but it is too broad and I can't tell whether it is an introduction page, a pricing page or an audit page.
- Ideal: "Delivery list of 30-day GEO audit" "Structured data implementation example of B2B SaaS" - clear entities, converged scope, and independently understandable.
- Excessive: cramming the entire sentence into the anchor point, or forcibly repeating the target keyword three times will dilute the meaning and make it read like a machine.
Do it yourself: Four steps to change internal links to look like AI can understand
We have run this process many times on the customer site, and the order is very important - first take inventory, then determine the skeleton, and finally change the anchor points one by one, otherwise it is easy to change the east wall and miss the west wall.
- Take inventory of existing internal links. Use a crawler tool (Screaming Frog and the like) to extract the anchor text of the entire site, and filter out common words such as "click here", "learn more" and "read the full text". This batch is the first wave of lists to be changed.
- Define a "standard description phrase" for each important page. For example, the audit page is fixed around the statement "30-day GEO audit", so that the anchor points pointing to it throughout the site have consistent semantics, so that the model can easily aggregate scattered links into the same entity.
- Rewrite the anchor point by point so that it contains the topic entity of the target page and is naturally embedded in the sentence. The anchor point should fall in the sentence and read smoothly, rather than inserting a keyword.
- Check the consistency of the anchor with the target page title and H1. The theme promised by the anchor must be fulfilled at the beginning of the target page; too much of a gap will damage both user trust and model confidence.
Use hub-spoke skeletons to let anchor points form a topic map
No matter how good a single link is, it won't work without the overall structure. The real power of internal links comes from a predictable skeleton: a topic has a hub page (hub), and several sub-spokes (spokes) are connected back to the hub with descriptive anchor points and are also connected horizontally to each other. After crawling a few pages, the model can spell out "this website has a complete set of content under this topic that refers to each other", rather than scattered islands. With "GEO Audit" as the center, branch lines can be audit methods, common gaps, and methods of interpreting reports; each branch line is connected back to the center with "Return to GEO Audit Overview", and the center points to each branch line with descriptive anchor points. An anchor here is not just a navigation, it is a map of the topic that you draw for the model to see.
The three easiest pitfalls to step into
Anchor text is your only field that speaks to both the reader and the search model; writing it clearly saves the AI the effort of guessing, and the model will favor sources that don’t require it to guess.— Tenten GEO Content Team
How do you know if it works?
Don’t just focus on keyword rankings. The effectiveness of internal connections must be viewed from three aspects.
- Crawling surface: Use log files or Search Console to observe whether the crawling frequency of important pages has increased - descriptive anchors and clear skeletons will allow crawlers to find and return to deep pages faster.
- Search side: Test your core questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews to see if the model refers to your hub pages and branches. This is the signal that visibility tracking like Brand Radar should monitor.
- Behavioral aspect: Look at the clicks and subsequent stays of internal links. If the anchor point is accurate, the bounce rate of readers who click in will decrease.
Internal links are not a finishing touch to be added before going online, but an asset that needs to be maintained continuously - every time a new article is added, you should go back and connect it to the existing skeleton. If you want to know how many empty anchors there are on your site and where the theme skeleton is broken, you can make an appointment for a 30-minute GEO diagnosis, and we will take your real page and walk through the gaps.
