> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surnex.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Anchor text

> How other sites describe your pages when they link to them.

**Backlinks → Anchor Text** shows the distribution of anchor text across your backlink profile — the words other people use when linking to you.

## The table

| Column          | What it is                |
| --------------- | ------------------------- |
| **Anchor Text** | The link text             |
| **Count**       | How many backlinks use it |

25 rows per page, with a **Filter anchors…** box.

The [overview](/backlinks/overview) shows the same data as a **Top Anchor Texts** donut limited to the top 10; this page is the full list.

## What to look for

Anchor text is a relevance signal, so its distribution says something about how search engines read your site — and about how natural your link profile looks.

**A healthy profile is mostly branded and unremarkable.** Your company name, your domain, and phrases like "here", "this article", or the page title. Naturally-earned links are boring, because people link by naming you or by pointing at something.

**Exact-match commercial anchors should be a small minority.** If your target keyword is your most common anchor by a distance, that's the classic signature of bought or manipulated links, and it's a pattern search engines look for.

**Empty or missing anchors** usually mean image links. They pass authority but carry no textual signal.

**Anchors you don't recognize** — unrelated terms, other languages, spam phrases — are worth tracing back through the [backlink list](/backlinks/list) to see which sites are generating them.

## Rough proportions

There's no official ratio, but as a sanity check, a profile that grew naturally tends to look something like:

| Anchor type                          | Typical share     |
| ------------------------------------ | ----------------- |
| Branded (your name, your domain)     | The largest group |
| Generic ("here", "this site", a URL) | Common            |
| Page title or partial match          | Moderate          |
| Exact-match keyword                  | Small             |

If yours is inverted — exact-match dominant, branded rare — that's the finding, whether or not you built the links deliberately.

## Filtering

Filter to check a specific concern:

* Your brand name, to see how much of the profile is branded
* A target keyword, to check for over-optimization on it
* A competitor's name, to find comparison content linking to you

## States

| What you see                                                                  | Why                                              |
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------ |
| **Analyzing backlinks…**                                                      | A run is in progress                             |
| **No analysis yet** — "Run a backlink analysis first to see anchor text data" | Run one from the [overview](/backlinks/overview) |
| **No anchor data** — "No anchor text data matches your current filter"        | Clear the filter                                 |