Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words you click on in a link, which Google also calls link text. Google says it tells people and Google something about the page the link points to. Its guide asks for anchor text that describes the page, stays fairly short and fits both pages, like "list of cheese types" instead of "click here."
Source: Google Search Central, Link best practices for Google: Anchor text placement, checked October 29, 2026
What Anchor Text means for your business
Google has read link words this way from the start. Sergey Brin and Larry Page's 1998 paper said most search engines matched a link's words only with the page the link sits on. Google matched them with the page the link points to as well, because those words often describe a page better than the page itself does. In 2019, Google gave the same reason for not throwing away nofollow links completely.
That's also why link words get abused. Google's spam policies count links with keyword-loaded anchor text in articles, guest posts and press releases placed on other sites as link spam. When another site links to you, we'd let them use their own words, and your business name works fine.
Your own site is where you choose every link's words, so that's where we'd spend the effort. A link that says "emergency roof repair" tells a reader and Google more than "learn more" does. If your service pages rarely show up for the jobs you do, checking the words your site and others use to link to them is one of the first things we'd do.
Sources: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998); Google Search Central Blog, Evolving "nofollow": new ways to identify the nature of links (September 10, 2019), checked October 29, 2026
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview gave a plain definition and a list of anchor types, citing Moz, Semrush, Yoast, Wikipedia and YouTube but none of Google's own guides. ChatGPT gave much the same, with a table of types and nothing cited.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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