Overview
Introduction
Anchor text is one of the more overlooked on-page SEO and accessibility signals, mostly because it's easy to write a link and never look back at what the visible text actually says once you're done. "Click here" gets typed thousands of times a day without anyone auditing how often it shows up on a given page.
This tool surfaces that pattern directly: paste or fetch a page's HTML and its URL, and see every internal link's anchor text classified as generic, empty, image-only, or repeated, so you can decide what's worth rewriting.
What Is Anchor Text Analyzer?
An anchor-text auditor that parses <a href> elements with the browser's own DOMParser, keeps the internal (same-origin) ones, and classifies each by its visible text content against an explicit, documented list of generic phrases.
It also reports which anchors have no text at all (empty, or image-only when an <img> is the sole content), and builds a frequency count of exact anchor text that repeats more than once across the page, presented as raw data rather than a pass/fail judgment.
How Anchor Text Analyzer Works
HTML is parsed to collect every <a href> element's text content and check whether its only content is an <img>. mailto:, tel:, javascript:, and bare-fragment (#) links are skipped, and only links resolving to the page's own origin are analyzed.
Each internal link's text is trimmed and compared case-insensitively against the generic-phrase list for an exact match, checked for emptiness, and normalized text is tallied across all links to build the repeated-anchor-text frequency table.
When To Use Anchor Text Analyzer
Reviewing a page's internal links before publishing, to catch "click here"/"read more" links that could be rewritten to describe their destination.
Auditing an older page or template for accessibility gaps, where empty or image-only links with no alt text leave screen reader users with no context.
Checking whether a specific keyword phrase is being repeated as anchor text more heavily than natural writing would produce, as one input into a broader over-optimization review.
Often used alongside Internal Link Checker, External Link Checker and Broken Link Checker.
Features
Advantages
- Uses an explicit, documented generic-phrase list rather than a vague heuristic, so results are consistent and the criteria are fully visible, not a black box.
- Separates two distinct failure modes, empty text and image-only, that both present as "no visible anchor text" but need different fixes (writing text vs. fixing alt text).
- Surfaces repetition as raw frequency data rather than an arbitrary pass/fail threshold, since what counts as excessive genuinely depends on context this tool can't see.
Limitations
- This is a static-HTML snapshot, not a JS-rendered-DOM crawl; anchor text added or changed by client-side JavaScript after the initial HTML loads won't be reflected unless the pasted or fetched HTML already includes it.
- The generic-phrase list is an exact match against common English phrases; it won't catch generic anchor text in other languages or novel low-information phrasing outside the documented list.
- It only analyzes internal links; combine with the External Link Checker for anchor text used on outbound links.
Examples
Best Practices & Notes
Best Practices
- Rewrite flagged generic anchors to describe the destination page in a few words, e.g. "Click here" -> "View pricing plans", which helps both search engines and screen reader users navigating by link list.
- Give every image-only link meaningful alt text on the image itself, since that's what actually gets announced to assistive technology in place of visible anchor text.
- When a high frequency count shows up, check whether it's the same nav/footer link appearing many times (usually fine) or the same commercial phrase repeated in body content (worth a closer look).
Developer Notes
Frequency counting only includes non-empty anchor text and only reports entries appearing more than once, sorted descending by count, so the output stays focused on what's actually repeated rather than listing every unique anchor with a count of one.
Anchor Text Analyzer Use Cases
- Rewriting "click here"/"read more" links across a content-heavy page before a publish or content-refresh pass
- Accessibility review of a page's links for empty or image-only anchors with no accessible name
- Spot-checking whether a target keyword phrase is being over-repeated as internal anchor text
Common Mistakes
- Fixing every flagged generic anchor to the exact same descriptive phrase everywhere it appears, which trades one repetition problem (generic text) for another (over-optimized exact-match text).
- Assuming an image-only link is fine because the image itself is decorative-looking, without checking whether it's the page's only link to an important destination and therefore needs real alt text.
Tips
- Skim the frequency table for anchor text that's also a specific commercial keyword phrase (rather than a nav label like "Home" or "Contact"); that's the pattern most worth a closer look for over-optimization.