This category is about connections. Descriptive anchor text labels what each link points to; outbound links to credible sources signal grounded, trustworthy content; and broken links are a maintenance signal that erodes both. Link depth decides how reliably your important pages get crawled. AI engines use this link context to understand topical relationships and to gauge how well-supported your claims are.
Each check has a stable ID (F1–F5).
Anchor text is the visible, clickable words of a link, and it acts as a human-written label for the destination. Engines use it as a signal of what the linked page is about, so a descriptive anchor passes useful relevance to the target page — while "click here" or "read more" passes nothing.
For internal links you control every anchor, so describing the destination is an easy, high-value habit. Vary the phrasing naturally — repeating identical, keyword-rich anchors looks manipulative.
Descriptive anchors are also an accessibility win for screen-reader users, who often navigate by a list of link text alone.
A broken internal link sends users and crawlers to a dead end. For crawlers it wastes crawl budget; for users it's a frustrating 404. And it interrupts the flow of authority and discovery that internal links are supposed to provide.
Broken links accumulate naturally as pages are removed or URLs change without redirects. The remedy is periodic auditing: find them with a crawl, then fix, redirect or remove each one.
External links decay over time — the pages you cited get moved, restructured or deleted, leaving dead references on your page. Link rot is unavoidable but fixable with periodic checking.
Broken outbound links damage trust, undercut the credibility your citations were meant to provide, and signal stale, unmaintained content. Update each dead link to a current source, point it at an archived copy, or remove it.
Linking to authoritative external sources — peer-reviewed studies, official documentation, recognised publications — backs up your claims and shows your content is grounded in evidence rather than asserted in a vacuum. It's a quiet quality signal that supports the expertise and trustworthiness pillars of E-E-A-T.
Contrary to an old myth, linking out doesn't "leak" authority; citing good sources is a normal feature of credible content that engines understand. Link to genuinely authoritative, on-topic sources — not weak or tangential ones.
For GEO this matters extra: AI answer engines themselves cite trustworthy sources, and well-sourced content looks more like something worth citing in turn.
Click depth is the fewest clicks needed to reach a page from the homepage. Pages close to the homepage inherit more authority and get crawled more often; pages buried many levels deep are discovered slowly and can be effectively neglected.
Keep priority content shallow via clear navigation, category hubs and related-content links. A flat, well-linked architecture beats a deep, nested one for both crawl efficiency and authority distribution.
Why links & authority matter for SEO and GEO
Links are how the web expresses relationships and trust, and engines have read them that way for decades. Internally, your link graph decides which pages accumulate authority and how easily everything gets discovered — a great page that nothing links to barely exists. Externally, who you cite (and how) signals how well-grounded your content is.
For GEO, the link context is part of how an answer engine understands your topical relationships and judges whether your claims are supported. Descriptive anchors label your relationships clearly; outbound citations mark your content as grounded; and broken links quietly undercut both. None of it is glamorous, but a clean, intentional link structure is foundational to how authority flows and how engines read your site.
AI engines treat outbound citations the way a careful editor does — as evidence that a claim is grounded. Content that links to credible sources reads as trustworthy and is more likely to be cited; content full of unsupported assertions or spammy links is routed around. And because internal links define your topical relationships, they help an answer engine understand which of your pages is the authoritative one on a given subject — a core part of GEO / LLM readiness.
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