Internal linking for AI search: orphan pages, click depth and link text
Crawlers find and weigh pages by the links between them. Make sure every page in your sitemap is linked from another page, keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage, and use link text that says where the link goes.
Orphan pages
An orphan page is in your sitemap but no other page links to it. Search engines may still index it, but they treat it as unimportant, and crawlers that follow links never reach it. Comparison pages, location pages and old campaign pages are the usual orphans.
Fix: link each one from a hub page (a /compare page, a locations page) and from the pages it relates to.
Click depth
Pages more than three clicks from the homepage get crawled less often and carry less weight. Hubs, footer columns and links from related pages bring them closer.
Link text
“Read more”, “learn more” and “click here” tell a crawler nothing about the page they point to. Use the page’s subject: “SolidReach vs Profound”, “Rooms with a harbour view”, “How we price event planning”.
How SolidReach checks it
For dashboard clients, SolidReach reads up to 100 pages of the site, one at a time and at least a second apart (longer when robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay), and reports orphan pages, pages more than three clicks deep, the share of links with empty text like “read more”, and whether comparison pages have a hub and link to each other. See what the scanner does.
Questions
Does the footer count as internal linking?
Yes. A footer column linking to your key pages puts each of them one click from every page. Keep it to the pages that matter.
Is an XML sitemap enough?
No. A sitemap tells search engines a page exists; links tell them how it relates to the rest of the site and how important it is.