Anchor Text: Types, Ratios and Common Mistakes

Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. It tells the reader and Google what the destination page is about, and Google recommends that it be descriptive, concise and relevant. In your backlinks, a healthy profile mixes brand, URL, partial terms and generic phrases, with the exact-match keyword in the minority. There is no official ratio: what draws attention is always repeating the same commercial anchor.

Quick summary

• There are six practical anchor types: brand, URL, exact, partial, generic and image. Each has a different function and risk.
• Google does not publish an ideal ratio. Public studies show a weak correlation between exact-match anchors and ranking, and the authors advise against chasing percentages.
• The warning sign is not a number: it is your profile's most frequent anchor being a commercial keyword instead of your brand.
• On internal links you control the anchor, and should use descriptive text. On external links you influence it, but the editor decides.
• A "click here" anchor wastes context. An exact-match anchor repeated on every purchased link looks like manipulation.
• Audit your profile with the Search Console Links report and correct course on future links, not by editing old ones in bulk.

How to read this guide

If you are a beginner, read the sections on what anchor text is, the types and the step-by-step, and skip the code. If you already work in SEO, go to the sections on ratios, auditing and over-optimization. The overview of the topic is in the cluster's central guide, linked at the start.

What is anchor text and why does it matter?

It is the visible text you click to follow a link, and it matters because it describes the destination for people and for Google. According to Google's link best practices, good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page it is on and the page it links to.

<a href="https://yoursite.com/grind-size-guide">coffee grind size guide</a>

The same documentation advises avoiding generic phrases, such as "click here" or "read more", which say nothing about the destination. It also asks that the anchor be natural: stuffing text with keywords artificially falls under what Google's spam policies call manipulation. When the link is an image, Google uses the alt attribute as the anchor, and an empty alt wastes that context.

In plain English: think of a street sign. "Main Street" tells you where you will end up. "Click here" is a blank sign. And "best cheap florist buy roses online" is a sign with too much text, which looks like advertising and makes the reader suspicious.

For SEO professionals: the anchor is read together with the surrounding text and the title of the source page. A descriptive anchor inside a useful sentence delivers the context Google needs. The same anchor in a block of links, or in the footer of thousands of pages, falls under the practices the spam policy lists, such as links in footers or templates and keyword-rich links in widgets.

What are the types of anchor text?

The six most useful types in practice are in the table, with examples from a fictional shop called "Morning Roast", which sells specialty coffee.

Type	Example	What it is for	Risk
Brand	"Morning Roast"	Reinforces the name and is the most common format of spontaneous citation	Low
Naked URL	"morningroast.com"	Looks natural and identifies the domain	Low
Exact	"buy specialty coffee online"	Matches the keyword you want to rank for	High if repeated
Partial or phrase	"guide to choosing specialty coffee"	Contains the idea but varies the words	Low to medium
Generic	"in this article", "see the guide"	Natural in running text, but not very informative	Low, with little value
Image	alt="specialty coffee beans"	Describes the destination when the link is a photo	Low

The Ahrefs anchor text guide uses a similar split, with seven categories (exact, phrase, partial, branded, URL, random and image).

Is there an ideal anchor text ratio?

No. Google does not publish any ratio, and public studies do not support magic numbers. Any percentage you see around is a market reference, not a rule. What can be stated is a qualitative pattern: natural profiles tend to be dominated by brand, URL and varied phrases.

The Ahrefs guide cites a study of 384,614 top-20 pages across 19,840 keywords, in a scenario the text describes as that of 2019. The correlations between anchor types and ranking were weak (0.14 for exact anchors and 0.11 for phrase and partial, on average), and the authors recommend not manipulating ratios. It is old, observational data, and serves as an indication that anchor text alone explains little.

There is also a recent data point on brand anchors. In the Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, published on May 26, 2025, the number of branded anchors had a correlation of 0.527 with visibility in Google's AI Overviews, versus 0.218 for total backlinks. The authors themselves remind us that correlation is not causation. The prudent reading is that being cited by name goes along with visibility, not that brand anchors cause citation.

For SEO professionals: use a decision rule instead of a percentage target. Look at the profile's most frequent anchor. If it is your brand or the URL, the distribution tends to be natural. If it is a commercial keyword, investigate where those links came from (bulk purchase, partnership, blog network). Also compare with the profiles of those who already rank for your query, which tools show, to calibrate your expectation of variety, not to copy numbers.

How do you audit your site's anchors?

Export the anchors from Search Console, classify them by type and see which dominates. The Links report shows the most common link texts ("Top linking text"), in tables limited to 1,000 rows, with a sample of the links, according to the Search Console documentation. For large sites it is a partial snapshot, useful for seeing a trend and not for counting everything.

1. In Search Console, open Links and, under External links, the table of most common link texts.
2. Export to CSV and rename the text column to anchor.
3. Classify each anchor by type with the script below, adjusting the lists to your brand and keywords.
4. See the most frequent type and the exact anchors that repeat.
5. For future links (not old ones), plan the opposite of what dominates.

import csv
from collections import Counter

BRAND = ["morning roast", "morningroast"]
EXACT = ["specialty coffee online", "buy specialty coffee"]
GENERIC = ["click here", "read more", "in this article", "here", "see"]


def anchor_type(anchor: str) -> str:
    a = anchor.strip().lower()
    if a.startswith(("http", "www.")) or ".com" in a:
        return "url"
    if any(b in a for b in BRAND):
        return "brand"
    if a in EXACT:
        return "exact"
    if any(e in a for e in EXACT):
        return "partial"
    if a in GENERIC:
        return "generic"
    return "other"


with open("anchors.csv", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    counts = Counter(anchor_type(row["anchor"]) for row in csv.DictReader(f))

total = sum(counts.values())
for kind, n in counts.most_common():
    print(f"{kind}: {n} ({n / total:.0%})")

The script is a starting point: it does not understand variations such as plurals and accents, and it classifies as "other" whatever does not fit. For the full profile, the free backlink analysis tools show more links than Search Console, and the post on the natural backlink profile shows how to read the whole.

Hypothetical example: an unbalanced profile and the plan for future links

The numbers below are made up to show the reasoning. They are not targets.

Morning Roast has 20 backlinks from 14 domains. In the audit, the table comes out like this:

Type	Count	Reading
Exact ("buy specialty coffee online")	9	The most frequent anchor is commercial. That is the warning sign
Brand	4	Few for the size of the profile
Naked URL	3	Normal
Partial	2	Normal
Generic	2	Normal

On investigating, the shop finds that 7 of the 9 exact anchors came from the same link vendor, within two months. The plan is not to edit or delete old links, but to adjust what comes next: in the next 10 links, ask for brand and URL in the majority, a few partial phrases and no exact ones. After 3 months, repeat the audit. If there were a manual action notice for unnatural links in Search Console, the path would be different, described in penalties for artificial links and disavow.

Who chooses the anchor in each type of link?

It depends on who controls the source page. The table summarizes the decision power and the recommendation.

Context	Who chooses	Recommendation
Spontaneous citation	The author of the linking site	Nothing to do, and it is the most natural pattern
Press article or mention	The journalist	Provide the correct brand name and the canonical URL
Guest post	You suggest, the editor approves	Prefer brand, partial phrases and descriptive titles
Purchased link	You, usually	Brand, URL and partial phrases. Avoid exact in series
Internal link	You	Descriptive, specific text; see the internal linking guide

On internal links, the margin is wider: you control both ends and can use descriptive anchors, even close to the keyword, as long as they stay natural and vary by context. The caution is not to use the same anchor for different pages, because that creates ambiguity about which page is the answer.

How do you write a good anchor, step by step?

Follow these five steps on internal links and when requesting external links:

1. Read the sentence without the link. If it already makes sense, the anchor only needs to name the destination.
2. Describe the destination in 2 to 5 words. "coffee grind size guide" works, "here" does not.
3. Vary across pages and contexts. Do not repeat the same anchor in ten posts.
4. Avoid text that is too long. A whole sentence as an anchor dilutes the meaning and hurts reading.
5. Reread as a reader. The anchor promises something, and the page needs to deliver.

At Contentor, the backlink order asks for the target page and the anchor for each link. If you use this kind of service, apply the same logic: asking for brand, URL and partial terms instead of the exact keyword in series reduces the manipulation pattern. That does not eliminate the policy risk (Google considers links bought to manipulate rankings a violation), and the discussion is in is buying backlinks safe?.

When does exact-match anchor text become over-optimization?

It becomes so when the pattern, not a single anchor, draws attention: many links with the same commercial keyword, from similar sites, in a short time. On its own, an exact anchor is normal; it only signals manipulation when it dominates the profile.

In plain English: if all your friends, when talking about you, repeated the same memorized phrase ("the best cheap plumber in the neighborhood"), you would suspect they had coordinated. Real people describe things in different ways, and it is the same with links.

The most common signs of over-optimization:

• The most frequent anchor is a commercial keyword and not your brand.
• The same anchor appears across many domains, published on nearby dates.
• The target page is always the same commercial page.
• The source pages have little traffic, little relation to the topic, or share the same text template.

The fix is forward-looking: diversify on the next links. If the problem comes from a manual action, follow the process described in Google's documentation, and use disavow only as a last resort.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best anchor text for a backlink?

One that describes the destination naturally and fits the sentence. For the overall profile, the safest base is brand, URL and partial terms. The exact keyword has a place, in the minority, when it makes sense in the text. There is no perfect anchor, only a varied set.

Does Google prohibit exact-match anchors?

No. What the policies fight is manipulation, such as stuffing links with keywords artificially, not the use of the keyword itself. An occasional exact anchor, in a natural context, is common. The risk comes from repeating it in series, especially on purchased links.

What percentage of brand anchors should I have?

There is no official percentage, and public studies do not support a number. Use the qualitative criterion: your profile's most frequent anchor should be your brand or the URL, and commercial ones should be a minority. Review every quarter with the Links report.

Does anchor text matter for AI and ChatGPT?

No one outside the AI companies knows. What exists is correlation: in the Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, brand anchors correlated more with AI Overviews visibility than total backlinks did. That does not prove causation and does not cover ChatGPT. See the full analysis in backlinks and AI.

Can I change the anchor of a link I already received?

You can ask the site owner, and many editors accept reasonable adjustments. Avoid bulk changes, which draw attention, and prioritize what comes next. If the link is paid, agree on the adjustment with the vendor. For internal links, you edit them yourself and should keep descriptions clear.

Next step

Anchor text is one piece of a larger profile. The next step is to look at the whole: see what a natural backlink profile looks like and how the sponsored, ugc and nofollow attributes fit into that mix in dofollow, nofollow, sponsored and UGC.

Read also:

• What backlinks are and why they matter for SEO and AI
• Internal links: an SEO guide
• Is buying backlinks safe? Risks and best practices