Glossary
Anchor Text
The visible, clickable text of a hyperlink — a strong signal about the linked page's topic for both search and AI engines.
Anchor text tells crawlers what the destination page is about. "GEO methodology" linking to a GEO methodology page is a much stronger signal than "click here" linking to the same page.
What's the best anchor text strategy?
Use natural-language anchors that contain (or paraphrase) the target page's primary entity. Avoid exact-match keyword stuffing across many links — that pattern is penalized.
Does anchor text affect AI citations?
Yes — indirectly. AI engines learn associations between entities and pages from anchor text just as search engines do. Strong, entity-rich anchors reinforce which page is the canonical reference on a topic.
Part of the Cite Hustle GEO glossary — definitions for generative engine optimization and AI search.