Originally published in 2016 by Nick Young. Rewritten in August 2026 by Jim Stewart because the old rules no longer described how useful websites work.

Internal linking used to be reduced to keywords and “link juice”. That was too narrow then. It is useless now.

A good internal link has a practical job. It helps a person answer the next question. It helps a search engine find and understand the next page. It can also help an agent move from a claim to its supporting evidence, policy or action.

That does not mean there is a new trick for ranking in AI answers. There is not. Google says its AI search features use the same SEO fundamentals as Search, including making important content easy to find through internal links.[3] The real opportunity is to make the structure of your business legible to people and machines.

Three audiences, one information architecture

1. The customer

A customer does not arrive wanting to admire your site map. They arrive with a question.

Can you solve this problem? Have you done it before? Will it work with the systems we already use? What happens to our data? What should I do next?

Internal links should move that decision forward. A service page should link to relevant proof. A case study should link to the capability it demonstrates. A claim about safeguards should link to the policy that explains them. A useful article should link to the next useful article, not automatically to a sales page.

2. Search engines

Google uses links to discover pages and as a signal of relevance.[1] It also analyses the relationships between linked pages to understand site structure and relative importance.[2]

This is why a page you care about should not sit alone in an archive. It should be reachable from a relevant hub or another page that gives the link context.

For ecommerce sites, the practical structure is familiar: categories link to subcategories and products. Important products receive prominent contextual links. Search boxes and JavaScript interactions are not substitutes for ordinary crawlable links.[2]

3. Agents and AI-assisted discovery

Agents do not all crawl, render or reason in the same way. Do not build around claims of a universal “agent SEO” protocol.

Build a clear public information layer instead:

  • use real HTML anchor elements with useful link text and valid destinations;
  • keep important facts in visible text;
  • connect claims to evidence and sources;
  • expose canonical URLs and accurate dates;
  • provide structured or machine-readable representations when they add real value;
  • state what automated access is allowed;
  • keep private actions behind authentication and approval.

The eight rules that still matter

Do not start with a keyword list. Start with the question a visitor is likely to ask next.

If the page makes a capability claim, link to proof. If it introduces a technical idea, link to the explanation. If it creates purchase intent, link to the relevant offer or contact path.

Use a normal HTML anchor element with an href destination. Do not make essential navigation depend on a click handler attached to a button, card or generic element. Google explicitly recommends crawlable anchor elements with valid destinations.[1]

This also gives browsers, assistive technology and simple retrieval tools a much better chance of doing the right thing.

3. Write anchors that set expectations

“See how the founder assistant works” is more useful than “learn more”.

Good anchor text is concise, natural and specific to the destination. Do not cram keywords into it. Do not rely on the title attribute to explain an empty or vague link. The visible text and surrounding sentence should carry the meaning.[1]

4. Give every important page a route in

An XML sitemap is not a substitute for internal navigation.

Every page you want people or search systems to find should receive at least one contextual internal link.[1] High-value pages usually need more than one route: primary navigation, a capability hub, a relevant article, a case study or a footer utility.

5. Put proof close to the claim

If you say an agent reconciles several systems, link to the case study or evidence that shows what was reconciled. If you say contact data is stored in a particular way, link to the privacy policy.

This shortens the trust path. It also makes the relationship between proposition, proof and safeguards explicit.

Think in relationships:

  • a founder has a recurring operational problem;
  • a capability handles part of that work;
  • a case study demonstrates the outcome;
  • a policy defines the boundary;
  • a contact route starts a scoped conversation.

Internal links should express those relationships consistently. This is more useful than spraying links across every occurrence of a target phrase.

7. Promote what matters now

Site structure should reflect current priorities.

Link prominently to the services, products and proof that matter now. Remove links to stale offers. Update old articles that still attract discovery but no longer represent the business. Retire material cleanly when no honest replacement exists.

Do not leave yesterday’s navigation to describe today’s company.

There is no useful universal ratio such as one link every two paragraphs.

Audit for:

  • important orphan pages;
  • broken or redirected internal links;
  • vague anchor text;
  • old claims pointing to superseded offers;
  • important evidence buried too far from the claim;
  • navigation paths that work only through search or JavaScript;
  • pages with so many competing links that the next step is unclear.

Then measure whether people reach the pages and complete the actions that matter.

What we removed from the 2016 advice

The earlier version of this article contained several rules we would not recommend now:

  • adding title attributes as another place for keywords;
  • treating a link in the first paragraph as inherently more valuable;
  • limiting each destination to one link regardless of context;
  • using a fixed ratio of links to paragraphs;
  • preferring relative URLs because they save a trivial amount of page weight.

Those rules turn internal linking into mechanical SEO work. The better standard is simpler: make every important destination reachable, make every link understandable, and make the journey useful.

A practical internal-linking review

For each important page, ask:

  1. What decision does this page help someone make?
  2. Which pages should lead into it?
  3. What proof or explanation should it lead out to?
  4. Is each link a real anchor with a valid destination?
  5. Does the visible anchor text describe what comes next?
  6. Can a person understand the relationship without SEO jargon?
  7. Can a crawler or basic retrieval agent follow the same route?
  8. Does the page still represent the business we operate now?

If the answer to the last question is no, rewriting or retirement is usually better than adding more links.

Sources

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable — Link best practices for Google | Google Search Central [2] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/help-google-understand-your-ecommerce-site-structure — Help Google understand your ecommerce website structure | Google Search Central [3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features — AI features and your website | Google Search Central