Internal link
An internal link is a link from one page of your website to another page on the same site, like a guide linking to a product page.
An internal link is a link from one page on your website to another page on the same site. Your menu, your footer, the "related posts" under an article and a link in the middle of a sentence are all internal links.
They do three jobs. They help visitors find their way. They help crawlers find your pages. And they tell search engines which pages you think matter and what each one is about.
How to use them well
Link from pages that get visits to the pages you most want people to reach. Use words in the link that say what's on the other side: "our guide to grinding coffee for a French press" tells people and search engines more than "click here." Google's own advice on links says the same, and adds that a link needs to be a real <a href> link for Google to follow it.
Watch for pages that nothing links to. An orphaned page is hard for crawlers to find and easy for everyone to forget.
Internal links and AI bots
AI bots find pages much the way search crawlers do: they follow links. A page linked from your homepage and your main guides is easy to reach. A page three clicks deep, linked only from a filter menu that a script builds, may never be read.
Internal links also help a platform understand how your pages fit together. For example, if Fernhill Coffee's guide "how to choose decaf beans" links to its decaf subscription page with the words "our Swiss Water decaf subscription," a bot reading the guide learns what that page is and that Fernhill sells it.
In AnswerOrbit
Open a page in the Pages tab in Website to compare What a person sees with What a bot reads. Links and text that only a script adds show up as Hidden from bots. With server logs connected, Bot visits shows which pages the AI bots actually reached. See Website and AI traffic.