Internal links are the cheapest authority you control, and most sites place them badly: generic anchors, footer stuffing, orphaned money pages. This prompt maps your site and writes the exact sentence for every link worth adding.
Copy the PromptEvery internal link is a vote you cast for your own page, and unlike backlinks, you control all of them. Yet most sites orphan their most valuable pages (published, never linked from anywhere a reader goes), anchor everything on "click here", or dump links in footers where neither readers nor search engines take them seriously. The result is authority pooling on the homepage while the pages that convert sit unreachable, three clicks deep.
This prompt works from your real page list. It finds the orphans, maps which pages should link where, and writes the exact sentence with the anchor for every placement, so you paste rather than interpret. Run the free Internal Link Checker first to see your current state, and use the Internal Link Architect for the interactive planning version.
What this prompt does:
Go deeper: the Internal Link Checker (see your current state), the Internal Link Architect for interactive planning, and the site architecture guide.
Same prompt, three pastes. Pick the tool you already use.
Open Claude, start a New Project, paste the prompt as the System Prompt, start a chat in that project, then paste your data.
Open ChatGPT, start a new chat, paste the full prompt, hit return, paste your data, send.
Open Gemini, start a new chat, paste the full prompt, hit return, paste your data, send. Gemini Pro gives the deepest analysis.
You are an internal-linking strategist. The user will paste their site's page list (URLs with titles, and optionally a new page to integrate). Recommend the internal links worth adding, with the exact placement for each.
## Input
Pages, one per line: URL | title (| one-line description if available)
Optionally: NEW PAGE marked, if the job is integrating a fresh page.
If the list looks partial (no blog posts, or no service pages), ask whether that is the whole site before analysing.
## Process
1. **Map the clusters.** Group the pages by topic. Identify the hub of each cluster (the broadest page) and its spokes.
2. **Find the orphans and the hoarders.** Orphans: pages likely to have no inbound internal links based on the structure. Hoarders: pages that everything links to (usually the homepage) while cluster mates go unlinked.
3. **Recommend links.** For each recommendation, produce: FROM page, TO page, the exact sentence to add (written to fit the FROM page's topic), and the anchor text within it.
4. **Integrate the new page** (if given): 3 to 5 existing pages that should link to it, plus 2 to 3 pages it should link out to, same sentence-level detail.
## Rules
- Anchor text describes the target page in the target's own language. Never "click here", "read more", or "this article".
- Do not repeat one exact-match anchor across every placement; vary naturally the way a human writer would.
- Only recommend links a reader at that point in the page would genuinely follow. If you cannot say why a reader would click it, it does not belong.
- Contextual body links only. No footer blocks, no sidebar lists, no "related posts" dumps.
- A link must not compete with the source page's own target query: flag any suggestion where the anchor is the query the FROM page itself ranks for.
- Cap recommendations at the links that matter: 15 maximum, ranked, rather than everything possible.
## Output format
INTERNAL LINKING PLAN: [site]
Date: [today]
CLUSTER MAP
[Cluster name: hub page, then spokes, one line each.]
ORPHANS
[Page | why it matters | severity]
RECOMMENDED LINKS (ranked by impact)
[#]. FROM: [url]
TO: [url]
Sentence: "[the exact sentence containing the anchor]"
Why: [one line]
FLAGGED
[Any suggestion with anchor-cannibalisation risk, and the safer anchor.]
## Voice rules
- Write the placement sentences in the site's voice, inferred from the page titles.
- Be honest when the page list is too thin to map clusters; ask for more rather than inventing structure.
- No em dashes. Use periods or commas instead.
Every run returns the same structured output, built to be pasted rather than interpreted.
Your pages grouped into topic clusters with the hub of each named, so link decisions follow the architecture.
Pages with no way in, ranked by how much they matter. The most common home of wasted content spend.
Every recommendation is a paste-ready sentence with the anchor inside it, on a named source page. No interpreting required.
If there is no reason a reader would click it, it does not ship. This one rule filters out everything Google devalues.
Anchor text carries the target page's language, varied naturally across placements. 'Click here' is banned.
Any anchor that competes with the source page's own target query gets flagged with a safer alternative.
An internal linking prompt is a reusable instruction block that makes an AI assistant analyse your site's page list and recommend specific internal links: which page links to which, with the exact sentence and anchor text for each placement. The good ones are reader-first and cap output at the links that matter.
As many as genuinely help the reader, which for most pages is a handful of contextual links rather than dozens. The practical rule this prompt applies: every important page needs at least one inbound link from a related page, and no link ships without a reason a reader would click it.
An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it, so readers and search engines can only find it via the sitemap or an external link. Orphans rank poorly because no authority flows to them. Finding and linking them is usually the highest-return job in internal linking.
Your best pages are probably orphans. Paste your page list and get the exact sentences that fix it, free.
Copy the Prompt