Anchor text is the one on-page signal you give away every time you link to something, and it is also the one people write on autopilot. This tool reads every link on the page and asks whether the words inside it would tell a reader — or a crawler with no vision — where the link leads. Scores here run higher than most of the dataset, because a page written in ordinary prose tends to produce descriptive anchors without trying.
Here is where that sits. The median is 79/100, which ranks it 5 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 79 and 89 — a band 10 points wide. That is narrow: sites resemble each other on this measure, which usually means a platform is doing most of the work.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 1,170 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. Most results sit in the middle bands, which means sites differ here by degree rather than by whether they bothered at all.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | Anchor Text |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 1% · 9 |
| 20–39 | 1% · 16 |
| 40–59 | 3% · 34 |
| 60–79 | 61% · 719 |
| 80–100 | 34% · 392 |
| Total runs | 1,170 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where your score stands
A high score here does not mean the linking is good, only that the wording is. The tool can see that an anchor is descriptive; it cannot see whether the link was worth making. Read a strong score as "nothing is actively wrong", and spend the attention you save on whether the page links to the right places at all.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anchor Text | 68 | 79 | 79 | 89 | 100 | 80.4 | 11 | 100 |
How to read it: 79 is bottom-quartile, 79 is a typical page, 89 starts the upper quartile and 100 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
Two failures dominate, and they pull in opposite directions. Generic anchors — "here", "read more", "this page" — waste the signal entirely. Over-optimised anchors, where the same exact keyword is repeated across many links, look manufactured and have been a spam signal for well over a decade. The healthy middle is simply writing links the way you would say them out loud.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| No empty / textless links | 64% | Hard fail |
| Some branded anchors | 34% | Partial |
| Mostly descriptive anchor text | 4% | Hard fail |
| Low share of generic anchors | 3% | Partial |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Descriptive anchors” was the weakest area in 66% of scans.
What to fix first
Find the empty and textless links first, because they are usually a bug rather than a style choice: an icon link with no accessible label is invisible to both a screen reader and a crawler. After that, rewrite the generic anchors, and resist the urge to replace them all with the same keyword.
A typical scan passes 3.9 of 5 checks and leaves 1.1 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the Anchor Text Optimizer on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 79 | baseline | 34% | 1.1 | 1,170 |
Frequently asked questions
What is wrong with "click here" as anchor text?
It describes the action rather than the destination, so it carries no information about the linked page for anyone who cannot see the surrounding sentence — which includes screen-reader users navigating by link list, and crawlers weighing what the target page is about. It is also almost always replaceable with two or three words that read better anyway.
Can anchor text be too optimised?
Yes. Repeating an identical keyword-rich phrase across many links is one of the oldest recognisable link-manipulation patterns, and it reads unnaturally to a human as well. Varied, descriptive wording that changes with the sentence is both safer and better writing.
Do internal and external links need different anchor strategies?
The principle is the same — describe the destination — but the stakes differ. Internal anchors are entirely under your control and are one of the clearest ways to tell a search engine what your own pages are about. External anchors mostly signal editorial judgement: what you chose to send readers to, and how you characterised it.
What is a good score on the Anchor Text Optimizer?
In this dataset the median is 79/100, so scoring 79 puts you exactly in the middle. 89 is the start of the upper quartile and 100 or above is the top 10%; below 79 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the Anchor Text Optimizer?
“No empty / textless links”, which did not pass in 64% of scans. The costliest failures, though, are the ones scored as hard fails — this tool has 2, the most common being “No empty / textless links” at 64%.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — Anchor Text Optimizer benchmarks, 2 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/anchor-text-optimizer. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.