Why does the wording of my links matter?
Because the words you link are the only description a machine has of where the link goes before it follows it. "Our pricing for small teams" says something about the page behind it. "Read more" and "here" say nothing, so the link carries no meaning of its own.
What it actually is
Anchor text is the visible wording of a link. Each one is a tiny label for another page, and taken together they are how a site describes its own pages to anything reading it. We look at the links on your page that have words, set aside image links whose label lives elsewhere, and see how many of them lean on generic phrases.
Why it matters
Machines read link wording as a summary of the destination, and use it to decide what a page is about and which link answers a question. A screen reader user often hears a page as a list of its links, and a list of "read more, read more, read more" is useless to them; the accessibility guidelines ask that a link's purpose be clear from its text and its context for exactly that reason.
What good looks like
Links whose words would make sense read on their own: the name of the page, the thing it offers, the question it answers. A card that links to an article uses the article's title. The words are written for the reader, which turns out to be what serves the machine as well.
Being honest about it
An occasional "read more" is fine, and we do not flag a page for it. This only becomes a warning when generic wording is the pattern rather than the exception. It never fails a page: it is a missed opportunity to describe your own content, not a barrier to reading it.
Where most sites go wrong
The usual source is a design system where every card ends in the same button label, so a listing page with twenty articles has twenty identical links. The other is copy written for one sighted reader looking at the whole layout, where "here" made sense next to the picture and means nothing anywhere else.
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