**The words you link with — the anchor text — tell engines and users what the linked page is about.** This check looks at whether your internal links use descriptive anchors ("GEO readiness checklist") rather than generic ones ("click here", "read more"). Descriptive anchor text passes relevance signal to the target page and helps everyone understand where a link leads before they follow it.
It looks at the clickable text of your internal links and whether it describes the destination. Specifically:
- Descriptive anchors — link text that conveys what the target page is about (a topic or page name).
- Generic anchors — non-descriptive phrases like "click here", "read more", "this page" or a bare URL.
- Relevance signal — whether anchors give engines a meaningful clue about the linked page's topic.
Mostly descriptive anchors passes; several generic anchors is a warning; mostly non-descriptive anchor text is a fail.
GEObubbly examines the anchor text of internal links on the page and flags generic, non-descriptive phrases. It's a core, scored Links & Authority check that runs directly against the page's links.
Anchor text — the visible, clickable words of a link — is one of the signals engines use to understand what the linked page is about. When you link to a page about GEO readiness with the anchor "GEO readiness checklist", you pass a clear topical signal to that page; when you link with "click here" or "read more", you pass nothing useful. Internal links are where you have full control over this, so descriptive anchors are an easy, high-value habit: they help engines understand and rank the target page for its topic, and they help users (and screen-reader users especially) know where a link goes before clicking. The goal is natural, descriptive anchors that reflect the destination — not keyword-stuffed, identical anchors repeated everywhere, which looks manipulative. Vary them sensibly and keep them relevant. Good anchor text works hand in hand with internal linking generally: links distribute authority and discoverability, and descriptive anchors tell engines what that authority is about. For GEO, clear anchors help AI engines map the topical relationships between your pages.
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink — the words a user clicks to follow the link. It matters because engines use it as a clue to what the linked page is about: a link with the anchor "mobile viewport guide" tells engines (and users) far more about the destination than "click here". For internal links, where you control the anchor text completely, descriptive anchors pass a useful topical signal to your own pages and improve usability. Vague, generic anchors waste that opportunity and leave both engines and users guessing where the link leads.
Generic anchors like "click here", "read more" and "this page" describe the action rather than the destination, so they pass no information about what the linked page is about — to engines or to users scanning the page. They're also an accessibility problem: screen-reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of links, and a list full of "click here" entries is meaningless out of context. Replacing them with descriptive text that names the destination topic improves the relevance signal you send, the usability of the page, and its accessibility, all at once.
Good internal anchor text is descriptive, concise and relevant: it tells the reader what they'll find at the destination, using natural language that reflects the target page's topic. Aim for a few words that capture the subject — "Core Web Vitals checklist" rather than "here" — without stuffing in repetitive keywords or making every link to a page use the exact same phrase, which looks manipulative. Vary the wording naturally across different links to the same page. The test is simple: could someone understand where the link goes from the anchor text alone? If so, it's doing its job.
It can. While descriptive anchors are good, repeatedly using the exact same keyword-rich anchor for every link to a page — especially in an unnatural, forced way — can look manipulative and is a pattern associated with over-optimisation. The safer approach is natural variation: describe the destination in different but relevant ways across your links, as a human writer naturally would. For internal links the risk is lower than for manipulative external link-building, but the principle holds — anchors should read naturally and serve the reader, not be engineered solely to game a keyword.
Yes. Descriptive anchor text helps AI engines map the relationships between your pages and understand what each linked page is about, much as it helps traditional search. When your internal links clearly describe their destinations, engines can build a more accurate picture of your site's topics and which pages are authoritative on what. That topical clarity supports how your content is understood and, in turn, cited. Clear anchors are a small but genuine GEO signal, contributing to the well-structured internal linking that helps engines reason about your site.