Internal Linking

What this is for, in one sentence: Internal Linking reads your latest Entity Audit and shows you which of your own pages should link to which, inside the page copy, and what the site looks like once those links are in.

When to come here:

• After an Entity Audit finishes, to turn its findings into a short list of links your web person can add
• When an important page (a service, a product line, a location) rarely shows up in AI answers about your business
• Before a site rebuild or content refresh, to see which pages nothing links to today

Open it from Internal Linking in the sidebar under Opportunities, directly below Entity Audit. The page opens on the same view as the Entity Audit report’s Internal Links tab.

Business profiles only. Like Entity Audit, Internal Linking is for profiles set up as a Business. Profiles set up as Micro SME don’t get the Internal Linking item in the sidebar. The Viewer role doesn’t see it in the sidebar either.

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Where the recommendations come from

Internal Linking doesn’t crawl anything. It reads the newest finished Entity Audit for this profile and turns the audit’s view of your pages into links to add. A newer run that is still in progress doesn’t replace it until that run finishes.

If no Entity Audit has finished for the profile yet, a popup headed Run an entity audit first explains that internal linking is read from your entity graph, and that an entity audit is what generates it. Run entity audit opens the run form, and Not now closes the popup. The page underneath says the same thing and carries the same button, so it is never a dead end. A Viewer, who can’t start audits, gets Open entity audit instead.

If an audit is already running, the popup is headed Your entity audit is still running and the button is View progress. The page switches to the links on its own when the audit finishes.

To read the links from an older run, use Back to history. It opens the list of audits you have run, and each report there has its own Internal Links tab.

The counts at the top

The tab row is Overview, Report, Internal Links, Entity Registry and Graph View, the same tabs the Entity Audit report has. The Internal Links tab carries the number of links to add.

Internal links to add is the number of links this audit recommends. Fixes counts the fix-plan items those links belong to. See these in the fix plan, in the order to apply them opens those items in the audit’s fix plan. Where a fix needs your input before it can be applied, a Waiting on your answer count appears beside them.

Export downloads the list of links as PDF, Word (.docx) or Markdown (.md), the same three formats as the rest of the Entity Audit report. It only appears when the audit has links to add.

Reading the link map

Each box is one page of your website. The left column, Pages you edit, holds the pages where a link needs to be added. The right column, Pages that gain links, holds the pages those links point to.

Each arrow is one link to add, pointing from the page you edit to the page it links to. An arrow with two heads means the two pages should link each other.

The number on a page counts every link pointing at it today, menus and footers included. The links Zicy recommends go inside sentences, because a link in a sentence says more about a page than a menu entry does.

An amber box marks a page no other page links to today, often called an orphan page. Those are usually the first ones worth fixing.

A dashed box is a page still to be chosen: the audit knows a link is needed, and which page carries it is your decision.

Switch between Today and After the fixes to see the same pages before and after. Select any page to see the links to add on that page and the links to add that point to it. What am I looking at? beside the map explains each of these in short.

Why these links matter

Search engines find pages by following links, and the words in a link tell them what the page it points to is about. A page nothing links to is hard for them to find.

AI engines read your pages to work out how the parts of your business fit together. A link inside a sentence tells them two pages are related, and the sentence says how. A page that stands alone gets read alone, so an answer about your business can leave it out.

Adding the links

Zicy doesn’t change your website. Each recommendation names the page to edit and the page to link to, and the audit only prescribes a link when it can quote words already on the page you edit. Your web person adds the link inside that existing sentence. Menus and footers don’t count for this.

When the links are live, run a fresh Entity Audit. Internal Linking reads the new run once it finishes, so links you have added should no longer be listed as links to add.

Common questions

Does this cost anything to use? No. Opening Internal Linking only reads an audit that has already finished, and Entity Audit runs aren’t counted against your plan. Only one audit runs at a time per profile.

Why does the Internal Links tab say there’s nothing to add? There are three different reasons, and the tab says which. The audit may have found no links to add. It may have been an older run that didn’t look for links, in which case running a new audit gets them. Or it may have found link problems without being able to write the link for them, because it couldn’t quote the page’s own words. It then lists what it found, each one leading to its finding in the report.

How is this different from Internal Link Opportunities in Pages Summary? Pages Summary matches pages that share words with text you paste in. Internal Linking works from the Entity Audit’s map of your business and tells you which page should link to which. Use Pages Summary to find candidate pages quickly. Use Internal Linking for the links that matter structurally.

Why are menu and footer links counted but not recommended? They count because crawlers follow them. They aren’t recommended because a menu link carries no sentence around it, so it tells an AI engine nothing about how two pages relate.

Some of the pages it suggests aren’t ones I care about. The list comes from your site as the audit found it. If a page shouldn’t exist, deal with that first. Then re-run the Entity Audit and the recommendations will follow.

What to do next

• Entity Audit: re-run it after the links go live.
• Content Optimizer: if the page you need to edit needs a rewrite anyway, put the link in as part of that rewrite.
• Impact Tracker: add a marker on the day the links ship, so you can see what moved afterwards.