Definition
Internal linking is the system of links between pages on the same website: from the navigation and footer to the contextual links inside the text of an article or product description. It determines how visitors and crawlers move through your site, which pages are considered important and how search engines understand the relationships between topics.
Internal links do three things at once. They make pages discoverable: a crawler finds new URLs by following links. They distribute authority: the value your homepage and strong pages hold flows through links to the rest of the site. And they convey meaning: the anchor text and the context around a link tell the search engine what the linked page is about. 'Read more' says nothing; 'our approach to Shopify SEO' says everything.
The best structure is a hub-and-spoke or topical model: a pillar page per subject linking to all underlying cluster pages, cluster pages linking back to the pillar and to each other where it fits, and commercial pages fed from informational content. Every important page should be reachable within three clicks from the homepage and have at least a handful of contextual incoming links.
Common mistakes: stuffing all links into the navigation and footer (hundreds of site-wide links dilute the value of each link), using the same anchor text for different pages, linking to redirects or 404s, putting nofollow on internal links, and publishing new content without linking to it from existing pages. An internal link checker shows this per page.
For AI search, internal linking acts as extra context: a page linked from related pages with clear anchor text is more readily associated with a topic by a model. Traze automatically adds contextual links in both directions with every new page — from the new page to existing content and from relevant existing pages back — and reports orphans and broken links in the changelog.