Link building in AI search: a glossary
Anchor text
What is Anchor text?
Anchor text is the visible clickable text of a link, historically engineered to contain a target keyword because search engines used it as a relevance signal.
Who uses the term Anchor text?
Anchor text is universal SEO vocabulary and has been since the discipline began. Anchor text ratio management was a standard deliverable in link building for roughly two decades.
The term is also plain HTML vocabulary, describing the content of an <a> element.
How does Anchor text differ from related terms?
Anchor text is a handful of words inside the link. Surrounding content is the passage around it. The book's argument is that weight has moved from the first to the second.
Anchor text engineering is the deliberate manipulation of those words across a link profile, and is one of the practices the book puts on its stop-buying list.
What does Link Building in the Era of AI Search Engines say about Anchor text?
The book's line is that the machine reads the sentence, not the underline. It puts anchor-text engineering on its stop-funding list and redirects the effort: the negotiation that used to be about exact-match anchors becomes a negotiation about accurate surrounding descriptions, which it calls the same conversation with a different ask and a far better payoff.