The visible clickable text of a hyperlink — the strongest topical signal a link carries about what the destination page is about.
Anchor Text in plain English
When you create a link, the words inside the <a> tag are the anchor text. To a search engine, those words are a third-party vote describing what the linked page covers. "Best running shoes for flat feet" pointing at a guide tells Google what the guide is about with much more confidence than the page's own title alone, because someone else volunteered the description.
Anchor text comes in five practical flavors. Exact-match ("running shoes") is the strongest topical signal but the most likely to look manipulated when overused. Partial-match ("best running shoes for trail runs") signals the topic plus context. Branded ("RunOctopus") signals entity authority. Naked-URL ("runoctopus.com/guide") is weak topical signal but high-trust. Generic ("click here," "this article") wastes the opportunity entirely.
Search engines have penalized over-optimized anchor profiles since Google's 2012 Penguin update. A page that has 80% of its inbound links using the exact phrase "buy cheap viagra" reads as manipulation, not authority. The natural distribution for a well-earned link profile is mixed: brand-heavy, partial-match in the middle, exact-match rare and contextual.
On your own site, anchor text discipline is just as important. Internal links should describe what they point at — "see our buyer's guide for treadmills" beats "learn more." This helps users navigate and helps search engines understand site structure simultaneously.
Why anchor text matters for ecommerce
For ecommerce stores, anchor text is the easiest single change that compounds. Audit your blog and category copy for every "click here" or "learn more," rewrite to descriptive phrases that name the destination's topic, and you've upgraded the topical signal across hundreds of pages in an afternoon. AI search engines weight anchor text heavily when deciding which sources to cite, so this work compounds across both Google and the AI surfaces simultaneously.