What is anchor text in SEO? It is the visible, clickable text of a link: the words a reader sees underlined and a crawler reads as a description of the page on the other end. Every link has it, whether you chose it or someone else did. The question that matters to a link builder is not what it is but how much it matters, and the honest answer is: less than the anchor-ratio spreadsheets suggest.
What is anchor text in SEO, and what does it do?
Ahrefs’ guide to anchor text, written by Joshua Hardwick, quotes Google’s John Mueller saying that anchor text “gives additional context” about the linked page. That is the whole job. It helps a search engine understand what the target is about, in the words other people chose to describe it.
Notice what that framing leaves out. Mueller did not describe anchor text as a lever you pull to rank for a phrase. Context is a supporting signal, read alongside the content of the page itself, the page the link sits on and everything else a search engine knows. A link with a perfect keyword anchor from an irrelevant page adds little context worth having.
The seven types of anchor text
Ahrefs sorts anchors into seven types. You will see all of them in any anchor report for a site that has earned links naturally, usually in no particular pattern.
| Type | What it looks like | Who usually controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Exact match | The anchor is the target keyword itself | The linking site, or you if you placed the link |
| Phrase match | The keyword sits inside a longer phrase | The linking site |
| Partial match | A variation or some of the keyword’s words | The linking site |
| Branded | Your brand or site name | The linking site |
| Naked URL | The address itself, pasted as the link | The linking site |
| Random (generic) | “This post”, “here”, “this study” | The linking site |
| Image links | An image wrapped in a link; the alt text acts as the anchor | The linking site |
The third column is the point. For external links, nearly every anchor is someone else’s choice. A journalist writes your brand name. A forum user pastes the URL. A blogger writes “according to this guide”. That spread is what natural linking looks like, and it is why an anchor profile dominated by one keyword phrase reads as engineered.
What the data says about exact-match anchors
Ahrefs studied 384,614 pages to see whether exact-match anchors line up with rankings. They found weak correlations: an average Spearman correlation of 0.1436 and a median of 0.1869. Most pages in the study had zero exact-match anchors at all, and they ranked anyway.
Weak correlation is not no correlation, and correlation is not cause. Pages that rank well tend to attract more links of every kind, so some exact-match anchors arrive simply because a page is already the obvious result for its topic. What the figures do not support is the received wisdom that you need a target share of keyword anchors to rank. Most of the pages in that study managed without any.
Ahrefs’ own advice follows from that: “Don’t try to manipulate your anchor text ratios at all.” Anchors built to manipulate rankings are a link-spam risk under Google’s policies, and a profile of matching keyword anchors from placed links is the easiest pattern for a spam system to see.
The anchor text ratio myth
Search for anchor text ratios and you will find confident percentages: so much branded, so much naked URL, a small slice of exact match. None of those figures come from Google, and the source above does not offer one. They are usually averages taken from a handful of ranking pages, then presented as a recipe.
The flaw is in the method. An average of natural profiles describes what happened when nobody was steering. Reverse-engineering it into a target means steering, which produces a profile that is natural in proportion only. The links themselves are still placed, and a placed link with a carefully rationed keyword anchor is still a placed link. If you are buying links, our post on buying backlinks covers the risks; anchor maths does not reduce them.
The better use of an anchor report is diagnostic. If your profile is overwhelmingly one commercial phrase and you did not build it that way, look for who did. If it is varied, leave it alone. Either way, the action is about the links, not the percentages.
Anchor text SEO best practices you can actually control
There is one place where you choose every anchor: your own site. Internal links are yours to write, and descriptive internal anchors are the cleanest way to give a search engine context about your own pages. Our guide to internal linking for SEO covers how to plan them.
- Describe the target. Write the anchor a reader would need to know where the link goes. “Our guide to canonical tags” beats “click here”.
- Vary naturally. Repeating the identical keyword anchor on every internal link adds nothing after the first few times. Write each one for the sentence it sits in.
- Keep it short. A few words that name the topic, not a whole sentence underlined.
- Mind image links. When an image is the link, its alt text does the anchor’s job. Write it.
For external links you can influence, the same rule applies with a lighter touch. When you ask a site to fix a broken or unlinked mention, suggest an accurate anchor, usually your brand or the page title, and accept what they choose. Our post on link reclamation walks through that process. Asking for an exact-match commercial phrase on a mention that never used one turns a clean link into a suspicious one.
How to read your anchor report
Any backlink tool will group your referring links by anchor. Read it in three passes. First, how much of the profile is branded and naked URL? On a site that has earned its links, those usually lead, because they are what people type when they mention you. Second, are any commercial phrases over-represented? Check where those links come from before assuming the worst. Third, are there anchors in languages or on topics you have nothing to do with? Those point to scraped or spam links, which our post on toxic backlinks argues are usually best ignored.
The limitation is that an anchor report shows what links say, not what search engines do with them. Google does not publish how much weight anchor text carries, the Ahrefs study measures correlation rather than cause, and tools see only the links they have crawled. Treat the report as a description of your profile, not a score to optimise. More reading on earning links sits in our link building archive.
Frequently asked questions
What is anchor text in SEO?
The clickable text of a link. Google’s John Mueller has described it as giving additional context about the page being linked to.
What is the ideal anchor text ratio?
There isn’t one. Google publishes no ratio, and Ahrefs advises against trying to manipulate anchor ratios at all.
Do exact-match anchors help rankings?
Ahrefs’ study of 384,614 pages found only weak correlations, and most pages had no exact-match anchors at all. Building them deliberately is a link-spam risk.
Should internal links use keyword anchors?
Use descriptive anchors that tell a reader where the link goes. That usually includes the topic naturally, without repeating one phrase everywhere.
The takeaway Anchor text adds context, nothing more. Write descriptive internal anchors, let other sites describe you in their own words, and ignore anyone selling you a ratio.
