What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink — the words a reader actually sees and clicks, as opposed to the URL underneath. Search engines have long used anchor text as a relevance signal: a link with the anchor text "best project management software" tells a crawler something specific about what the destination page covers, distinct from what the destination page says about itself.

Anchor text is generally grouped into a few types: exact match (the anchor text is the literal target keyword), partial match (a variation or phrase containing it), branded (the anchor text is the company or product name), naked URL (the raw link with no descriptive text), and generic ("click here," "read more"). A healthy, natural backlink profile tends to have a mix dominated by branded and naked-URL anchors, since that's how people actually link when they're not trying to manipulate rankings.

An anchor-text profile that's unnaturally dominated by exact-match keywords is a classic signal of manipulative link building, and search engines have specifically targeted that pattern in ranking algorithm updates — so beyond describing what a page is about, anchor text diversity is itself a trust signal.