Internal Anchor Text 2026: 81% Echo the Target's H1

    81.0% of 76,500 sampled internal text links on 167 crawled sites use anchor text that shares at least one meaningful word with the target page's H1.

    Internal anchors whose words exactly match the target H1, by site type
    Stores41.9%
    WordPress sites37%
    Business sites34.6%

    Source: PageSpeed Matters. 76,500 sampled internal links on 167 ranking sites, Oct 2026.

    Sampled from the first 1,000 links found on each site.

    Source: Internal Anchor Text 2026: 81% Echo the Target's H1 - PageSpeed Matters