Internal linking (for AI)
Internal linking is linking one page of a website to another page of the same site, ideally inside a sentence, so search engines and AI engines can see how the two pages relate.
Search engines find pages by following links, and the words around a link tell them what the page it points to is about. A page that nothing links to is hard for them to find.
AI engines use the same signals to work out how the parts of a business fit together. A link inside a sentence says two pages are related, and the sentence says how. A page that stands alone tends to be read alone, so an answer about the business can leave it out.
A page no other page links to is often called an orphan page. Orphan pages are usually the first ones worth fixing.
Menu and footer links still count, because crawlers follow them, but they carry no sentence around them, so they say little about how two pages relate.
What it looks like in practice.
A clinic has a page for each treatment, but only the menu links to them. Adding a link from a sentence on the about page that mentions skin treatments to the main treatment page tells an engine the two belong together.
How Zicy measures it.
Zicy's Internal Linking reads your latest Entity Audit and lists the links to add, page by page, with orphan pages marked. See Entity Audit and Internal Linking.
Keep reading.
Questions about Internal linking (for AI).
What is internal linking?
Internal linking is linking one page of a website to another page of the same site, ideally inside a sentence, so search engines and AI engines can see how the two pages relate.
What is an orphan page?
A page that no other page on the site links to. Crawlers find it late or not at all, and AI engines tend to read it on its own, without the context of the rest of the site.
Do menu and footer links count?
They count because crawlers follow them, but a link inside a sentence says more, because the sentence explains how the two pages relate.
Measure it with Zicy.
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