Anchor Text Analyzer
The words inside a link tell readers and search engines what to expect on the other side. This analyzer sorts every link on a page by the kind of anchor it uses: descriptive text, branded text, generic phrases such as “click here”, naked URLs, images with alt text and links with no accessible text at all. It lists the most used anchors and points out the same text leading to different pages, which confuses screen-reader users.
- Encrypted connection
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use Anchor Text Analyzer
- Enter a page URL (or paste its HTML).
- Optionally enter your brand name.
- Click “Analyse anchor text”.
- Rewrite generic and empty anchors.
Anchor Text Analyzer features
Distribution
Share of each anchor type.
Generic anchors
“Click here”, “read more” and similar.
Empty links
Links with no accessible name.
Ambiguous anchors
Same text, different targets.
Top anchors
Most used texts with counts.
Paste mode
Analyse HTML you paste, e.g. a staging page.
When to use Anchor Text Analyzer
- Improving accessibility of navigation and articles.
- Reviewing internal anchor text for key pages.
- Finding image links without alt text.
- Checking a template for repeated “read more” links.
Anchor Text Analyzer FAQ
Is “read more” bad?
One or two are fine, but a page full of identical “read more” links is hard to navigate with a screen reader, which can list links out of context. Add the topic: “Read more about pricing”.
What is a naked URL anchor?
A link whose text is the address itself. It is acceptable for citations but hard to read and says little about the target.
How does it treat image links?
An image link uses the image’s alt text as its name. Without alt text the link has no name.
Does it see content added by JavaScript?
No. It reads the HTML the server sends, which is also what search engines see first. Content that appears only after scripts run is not analysed.
Why anchor text matters
Anchor text is one of the oldest signals search engines use to understand a linked page. For visitors it is even more important: people scan links, and screen-reader users often jump from link to link. Clear anchors make both groups faster.
Over-optimised anchors – the same exact keyword on every link – look unnatural, while purely generic anchors waste the opportunity to describe the target. The distribution helps you find the balance.
Use the Internal Link Analyzer to see anchor texts grouped per target page.
Results reflect the page at the moment of the check. Pages that serve different content to different visitors, countries or devices may show different results in a crawler; when in doubt, compare with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which shows what Google itself fetched.
Privacy: the address you enter is fetched by our server only to run this check. The downloaded HTML is passed to your browser for analysis and is not stored, and the results are not saved on our side. Requests are rate-limited to keep the service fair for everyone, so if you check many pages in a row you may need to wait a few minutes.
Limits: pages are read up to 2 MB of HTML, redirects are followed up to eight hops and each request has a short timeout. Very large pages, servers that block automated requests or pages behind a login cannot be analysed this way; for those, open the page in your browser, copy the page source and use the paste option where it is available.
Tip: fix the problems marked red first, because they affect whether a page can be found at all. Yellow warnings are worth reviewing but are often harmless in context, and blue notes are information. After a change, run the check again to confirm the result – search engines will pick up the change on their next visit to the page.