Description
Anchormap is an internal linking plugin for WordPress. It shows you the internal links your site already has, finds orphan pages that nothing links to, and suggests the internal links you are missing, with the anchor text already highlighted in your own sentences. Review a suggestion, click Insert link, and you are done.
Internal links are one of the few SEO levers you fully control. They help search engines crawl and understand your site structure, pass authority to the pages you want to rank, and keep readers moving to related content. But on a site with more than a few dozen posts, nobody remembers what links where. Anchormap does.
👉 Try it before you install: click Live Preview at the top of this page to open Anchormap on a demo blog in your browser.
What Anchormap does
- Visual internal link map: An interactive graph of every internal link on your site. Spot hub pages, isolated clusters and orphan pages at a glance.
- Orphan page finder: Lists pages with no internal links pointing at them, the pages search engines struggle to discover.
- Internal link suggestions: A ranked list of links you should add, showing the page to link from, the anchor text and the page to link to.
- Smart anchor text: Anchors are real phrases that already exist in your content, chosen for how descriptive they are. Anchormap never writes new text into your posts.
- One-click link insertion: Insert link adds the link in place and saves a post revision, so every change can be undone.
- Internal link audit table: Sortable columns for inbound and outbound links, links to add, links wanted, broken links, nofollow links, links to drafts, links through old slugs that redirect, external links and word count.
- Broken and redirected internal links: Find links pointing at deleted pages, drafts or old URLs that redirect.
- AI relevance check: Press Ask AI on any suggestion and a language model judges whether the link helps the reader and picks the best wording.
Why it finds better internal links
A suggestion only appears when two things are both true:
- The pages are about the same topic. With an embedding model this is true semantic matching, so related pages are found even when they share no keywords. Without one, Anchormap uses TF-IDF keyword similarity over your own content.
- There is a natural place for the link. A phrase describing the destination must already sit in the source page’s body text, somewhere a link is allowed, and never inside an existing link, a heading, a code block or a shortcode.
Either signal alone produces noise. Requiring both turns “these posts are related” into “put this link in this sentence”.
Works with or without AI
- No API key needed. Leave AI switched off and the link map, orphan detection, internal link suggestions, anchor matching and one-click insertion all work on keyword similarity. Nothing leaves your site.
- Uses the WordPress AI Client. If your site already has an AI provider set up under Settings AI, Anchormap uses it automatically. No extra key is needed.
- Or bring your own endpoint. Sites without the AI Client can connect any OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic-format endpoint, including gateways and self-hosted models.
Internal linking tips that help your pages rank
Anchormap is built around these internal linking best practices. Use them as a checklist:
- Fix orphan pages first. A page with no internal links pointing at it is hard for search engines to find and receives no internal authority. Filter the table to Orphans and give each one at least two or three relevant internal links.
- Use descriptive anchor text. “Choosing a burr grinder” tells readers and search engines what the next page is about; “click here” does not. Anchormap rejects one-word anchors for this reason.
- Vary your anchors. Linking to the same page with the exact same phrase everywhere looks unnatural. Use the different phrases that already occur in your writing.
- Link from your strongest pages. Pages with the most inbound links carry the most authority. Sort the table by Inbound and add links from your top pages to the posts you want to rank.
- Build topic clusters. Link a pillar page to every supporting article and each supporting article back to the pillar. The link map shows whether your clusters are really connected.
- Link where it helps the reader. A contextual link inside a relevant sentence is worth more than a list of links in a footer. Only add links a reader would actually click.
- Keep links in body content, and keep them healthy. Fix broken internal links, update links that go through redirects, and avoid nofollow on internal links, because nofollow passes no authority.
- Re-scan after publishing. Every new post is a chance to link to older content and to link older posts to it. Re-scan, review the new suggestions, and your site structure improves with every article.
Who it is for
Bloggers, content marketers, SEO consultants, agencies and publishers who want a clearer site structure and better rankings without spending an afternoon on a manual internal link audit. Anchormap works alongside any SEO plugin and any theme, and supports posts, pages and public custom post types.
Privacy friendly
No tracking, no account and no external calls unless you configure an AI provider yourself. See External services below for exactly what is sent, and when.
External services
This plugin can send content to a third-party AI service, but only when you configure one. With no provider configured, no data leaves your site.
What is sent, and when:
- Indexing (embeddings). If you set an embedding model, the title and up to the first 6,000 characters of each published post in the post types you select are sent to the embeddings endpoint you configure, to compute a similarity vector. This happens when you press “Scan my site” (or “Re-scan site”), and only for posts whose content changed since the last scan.
- Ask AI (chat). If you press the “Ask AI” button on a single row, that row’s anchor text, the surrounding sentence from the source page, and up to 1,200 characters of the destination page are sent to the chat endpoint you configure, so the model can judge the link and suggest wording.
Nothing else is transmitted, and nothing is sent on a schedule or in the background.
Which service receives this data is entirely your choice: you supply the endpoint URL, the API key and the model name. If you route through WordPress’s AI Client instead, the request goes to whichever provider you configured in WordPress. Because the destination is your own configuration, you should consult the terms and privacy policy of whichever provider you point it at. For the common providers:
- OpenAI terms: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/ , privacy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
- Anthropic terms: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms , privacy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
- Google Gemini terms: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms , privacy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Support
Questions and bug reports: please use the support forum on this page.
Built by Sanjay Shankar M (https://sanjayshankar.me). If Anchormap saved you an afternoon of manual link auditing, a review helps other site owners find it. You can also buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/sanjayshankar
Screenshots
Installation
- In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins Add New, search for Anchormap, then click Install Now and Activate. (Or upload the plugin folder to
/wp-content/plugins/.) - Go to Internal Links Settings and choose which post types to analyse. Connecting an AI provider is optional.
- Go to Internal Links Link Map and click Scan my site.
- Open Internal Links Opportunities to review internal link suggestions and insert the ones you like.
FAQ
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Does internal linking help SEO?
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Yes. Internal links help search engines discover and crawl your pages, understand which pages are related, and decide which pages are most important. They also spread authority from strong pages to newer ones and keep visitors on your site longer. Anchormap makes finding and adding them fast.
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What is an orphan page?
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A page with no internal links pointing to it from the rest of your site. Search engines may crawl it rarely or not at all, and it receives no internal authority. Anchormap marks orphan pages with a red ring on the map and lets you filter the table to show only orphans.
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How many internal links should a post have?
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There is no fixed number. Add a link wherever it genuinely helps the reader: typically a handful in a normal-length article, more in long guides. The Max suggestions per page setting keeps Anchormap’s suggestions focused.
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Do I need an API key?
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No. Without one, matching uses TF-IDF keyword similarity over your own content and everything still works. An embedding model makes the matching semantic rather than keyword-based.
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Will it edit my posts without asking?
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No. Links are only written when you press “Insert link” on a specific row, one row at a time. Each insertion creates a post revision, so it can be undone from the editor.
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Can the AI put words into my content that I did not write?
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No. When the model suggests different anchor text, it is used only if that exact string already exists in the source post. The plugin wraps existing text in a link; it never writes new text.
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Where will it not place a link?
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Inside an existing link, a heading, a code or preformatted block, a blockquote, a shortcode, or a block comment. Only body prose is considered.
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Does it work with my SEO plugin, theme and page builder?
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Anchormap works alongside any SEO plugin and any theme; it only reads and edits post content. Content that lives in the normal post content (the block editor and the classic editor) is fully supported. Page builders that store text elsewhere, or blocks that keep their text in block attributes, leave little body text to link from, so those pages still appear on the map but may get fewer suggestions.
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Does it work with custom post types?
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Yes. Any public post type can be enabled in the settings.
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Is this AI, or just text matching?
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Both, and it matters which half does what. Which pages are related is decided by AI (embeddings), or by keyword similarity when AI is off. Which words become the anchor is decided by a scoring heuristic, not AI. Whether a specific link is worth making is decided by AI only when you press “Ask AI” on that row.
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How is the score calculated?
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0.55 × similarity + 0.45 × anchor quality, plus a bonus when the destination has no inbound links. Similarity is the cosine similarity between the two pages, rescaled against your own site’s distribution on every scan. Anchor quality combines phrase length, word rarity, overlap with the destination’s title weighted by how distinctive the shared words are, and a check that the destination really is the page most about that phrase.
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It sends one row to your chat model with the anchor, the sentence around it and a summary of the destination, and asks whether the link helps the reader. It adopts a different anchor only if that exact text already exists in your post, blends its confidence into the score rather than replacing it, and explains its reasoning under the anchor. It costs a fraction of a cent per press, and nothing until you press it.
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Why are anchors always two or more words?
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Because one-word anchors like “services”, “analysis” or “reports” match a related page but tell the reader nothing about where they are going. Single words are rejected unless the destination’s whole title is one word. The
anchormap_min_anchor_wordsfilter overrides this. -
Does it work with bold, italic or other HTML around the text?
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Yes, including when formatting splits the phrase: AI visibility tracking is matched and linked as a whole. A phrase is skipped only when wrapping it would split a tag pair and produce invalid HTML, or when it sits in a heading, an existing link or a code block.
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Will it slow down my site?
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No. Anchormap only runs in the admin when you start a scan, in small batches. It adds nothing to your front end: no scripts, no styles and no markup for visitors.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Anchormap – AI Internal Linking & Link Map” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
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Changelog
1.0.1
- Clearer plugin description.
- Removes an empty folder that was accidentally included in 1.0.0.
1.0.0
- First public release: internal link map, orphan page finder, internal link audit table, ranked internal link suggestions with one-click insertion, and optional AI via the WordPress AI Client or your own endpoint.