How to Write Descriptive Link Text: Complete Guide (2026)

Why Descriptive Link Text Matters

Link text is one of the rare elements that affects accessibility, SEO, and AI visibility with the same edit. Get it right once, three audiences benefit.

• Screen-reader users navigate by link.NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver all let users pull up a context-stripped list of every link on the page and Tab through it. "Click here" repeated a dozen times forces the user to either restore context manually or guess.
• AI search engines parse link text as topical signal. When Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity summarize a page, they use the anchor text of internal and outbound links to infer the relationships between concepts. Generic anchors flatten that signal.
• SEO ranking signal.Anchor text has been a documented Google ranking factor since the original PageRank papers. "Read more" passes no topical signal; "2026 Core Web Vitals checklist" does.
• Cognitive load drops for everyone. Sighted users scan pages by jumping between links and headings. Descriptive anchors let them decide which link to follow without reading the surrounding paragraph.
• Mobile and voice-first contexts.Screen real estate and voice interfaces don't always surface surrounding context. The anchor text is often the only string the user hears or sees.

What the link-name Audit Catches

The link-name rule fails the strict accessibility cases — links with no accessible name at all. Heuristic checks then flag a wider set of low-quality patterns.

• Empty link: <a href="/page"></a> — no text, no aria-label, no title. The user hears nothing.
• Image-only link with no alt: <a href="/cart"><img src="cart.png"></a> — the image has no alt, so the link has no accessible name.
• Icon-font link with no label: <a><i class="fa-search"></i></a> — the glyph isn't real text and the link has no aria-label.
• Generic link text: "click here", "here", "read more", "learn more", "more". The audit may pass technically, but heuristics flag it as a warning because it fails WCAG 2.4.9.
• URL as link text: <a href="https://...">https://www.example.com/very/long/url</a> — screen readers read the entire URL character by character.
• Duplicate text, different destinations: two "Read more" links pointing to different pages, indistinguishable in the link list.

<!-- Bad: empty link -->
<a href="/page"></a>

<!-- Bad: generic text, no topical signal -->
<a href="/blog/2026-seo-checklist">click here</a>

<!-- Bad: URL as link text -->
<a href="https://www.example.com/blog/2026-seo-checklist">
  https://www.example.com/blog/2026-seo-checklist
</a>

<!-- Bad: image link with no alt -->
<a href="/cart"><img src="cart.png"></a>

<!-- Good: descriptive text -->
<a href="/blog/2026-seo-checklist">Read the 2026 SEO checklist</a>

<!-- Good: icon-only link with an accessible name -->
<a href="/search" aria-label="Search">
  <svg aria-hidden="true" focusable="false">...</svg>
</a>

<!-- Good: image link with alt as the accessible name -->
<a href="/cart">
  <img src="cart.png" alt="View shopping cart">
</a>

<!-- Good: card pattern — descriptive heading link, full-card click via ::before -->
<article class="card">
  <h3>
    <a href="/blog/2026-seo-checklist" class="card-link">
      Read the 2026 SEO checklist
    </a>
  </h3>
  <p>An updated guide to ranking in 2026...</p>
</article>
<style>
  .card { position: relative; }
  .card-link::before {
    content: "";
    position: absolute;
    inset: 0;
  }
</style>

How to Check Your Site for Link-Text Issues

Most teams have a small number of empty or icon-only links and a long tail of generic anchors. A single audit pass surfaces both.

• Greadme deep scan — runs the accessibility audit pass on a single page, surfaces every empty or weak link, and pairs each finding with an AI-generated rewrite or a one-click GitHub PR.
• Greadme crawler scan — checks every indexable page on the site so you catch "Read more" anchors in repeating templates (blog cards, related-post lists, product grids).
• Greadme AI visibility analyzer — confirms that the descriptive link text on key pages is feeding the topical signal AI search engines extract.
• Chrome DevTools → Accessibility pane — inspect any link to see the computed accessible name; if it's empty or generic, the screen-reader experience is too.
• Google Search Console → Links report — review the most-used internal anchor texts; a top-10 dominated by "Read more" or "Learn more" is a red flag for both SEO and accessibility.
• Screen-reader links list — open the page in NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver and bring up the list-of-links view. If you can't guess what each link does from the text alone, neither can a real user.

8 Rules for Writing Descriptive Link Text

Common Link-Text Failures and How to Fix Them

Generic vs Descriptive Link Text — Side by Side

The same link, written four different ways, succeeds or fails for very different reasons depending on which audience you optimize for.

FAQ

What is descriptive link text?

Descriptive link text is the visible text inside an <a>element that clearly describes where the link goes — readable on its own, without needing the surrounding sentence. "Read the 2026 SEO checklist" is descriptive; "click here" is not.

Which WCAG criteria cover link text?

Three are most relevant. SC 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) at Level A requires the purpose to be clear from the link plus its immediate context. SC 2.4.9 Link Purpose (Link Only) at Level AAA requires the link text alone to convey purpose. SC 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value at Level A requires every link to expose an accessible name to assistive technology.

Does "click here" fail the link-name audit?

Not technically — "click here" gives the link an accessible name, so the strict link-namerule passes. But heuristic checks flag it as a warning because it fails WCAG 2.4.9, and screen-reader users routinely cite "click here"-style anchors as the worst pattern in their links lists.

How do screen readers handle empty links?

They announce "link" with no name, leaving the user no way to know where it goes. NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver all expose a links list that strips surrounding context, so an empty or generic link is functionally invisible in that view.

What's the right pattern for icon-only links?

Add aria-label to the link with a short verb-object phrase ("Search", "Open menu", "View cart") and mark the inner SVG or icon glyph with aria-hidden="true"so it isn't announced separately. The link then has exactly one accessible name from one source.

Do AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity care about link text?

Yes — directly. AI search systems parse anchor text to map a page's outbound and internal navigation, and the resulting graph influences how the page is summarized and cited. Descriptive anchors give AI extractors a clean concept-to-concept signal; "click here" gives them noise.

How does descriptive link text help SEO?

Anchor text is a documented Google ranking signal that has been part of the algorithm since the original PageRank papers. Descriptive internal anchors carry topical signal to the destination page, helping it rank for the relevant queries; generic anchors carry essentially none.