Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a hyperlink: the words a reader sees and a crawler records before either of them follows the link to its destination.

How a crawler reads it

As a label for the destination. Google’s link best practices asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant both to the page it sits on and to the page it points at, and gives a test: read the linked words on their own, and if you cannot tell where they lead, they are too vague. Words like “click here” fail it. The same page notes that a link only counts as a link when it is an a element with an href; a span with a click handler is not something a crawler can follow, whatever its text says.

Anchor text also lives inside the sentence around it. A link placed mid-sentence inherits that sentence as context; a row of links with no prose between them gives the crawler nothing but the labels.

Anchor text and AI answers

This site has not measured whether anchor text changes what an assistant says. What can be stated is the mechanism. An assistant’s retrieval fetches the page and reads the text, link labels included, and a label that names the thing it points at (a service, a price list, an address page) is one more sentence fragment that says plainly what the business does. A label that says “more” is not. Beyond that the honest answer is that the effect is unmeasured here.

A common question

Is there evidence that better anchor text changes what an AI assistant says?

Not here, because it has not been measured. The mechanism is all that can be stated: retrieval fetches a page and reads its text, link labels included, so a label naming its destination, a service, a price list, an address page, is one more fragment saying plainly what the business does, while a vague label is not. A link also only counts as a link when it is an a element with an href, since a crawler cannot follow a click handler whatever its wording. Beyond that, the honest answer is that the effect is unmeasured.

Sources

Descriptive-label guidance and the crawlable-link requirement: Google’s link best practices. No first-party figure exists for anchor text; the effect on assistant answers is stated as unmeasured above.