Internal Linking Grows Up: Evolving From Link Juice To Entity Maps via @sejournal, @Kevin_Indig

Let’s reminisce for a moment. Do you remember how, back in 2020, we all obsessed over “link juice” and PageRank flow as far as internal links are concerned?

In 2025, what matters more is how your internal links define the entities and relationships on your site.

Internal linking is no longer just about distributing authority. It’s about:

• Building your own semantic map that Google can trust.
• Reinforcing your topical authority.
• Earning a place in an AI-search-forward landscape.

The last full guide I wrote on internal linking strategies was in 2020, and – well – much has happened since then (to say the least).

And most internal linking guides treat links as simple “traffic routers,” ignoring their role in building entity context.

So today, yes, I’m revisiting some of the basic building blocks of SEO, but we’re going to expand how we think about internal linking.

If you’re already deep into entity-first SEO and apply it to your internal linking tactics, skip ahead to the action items to ensure you’re implementing it well.

For everyone else, I’ll explain why tightening up your internal linking structure isn’t just table stakes. It’s one of the simplest core levers to influence organic visibility.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

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Internal linking is the age-old SEO practice of connecting one page on your site to another page, all on the same domain.

These links act like the roads or highways that guide users through your content. But they also help search engines understand how your pages relate.

In the past, we thought about internal links as “pipes” for PageRank.

Add enough links from your homepage or other strong, well-ranking pages, and you’d push authority toward the URLs you wanted to rank.

That view isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete.

Today, internal links aren’t just distributing authority. They’re defining the semantic structure of your site.

Internal linking isn’t simply a practice that routes people (and bots/crawlers) to the pages you want them to go to.

In fact, when we think about internal linking this way is exactly when we start to half-ass the practice or let it sit on the back burner.

The words you use in anchor text and the way you connect hubs of related content all signal to search engines: These are the entities your brand wants to be known for.

Strategic internal linking can do three critical things for your site:

1. Reinforce entity authority. You’re signaling to Google, and everyone else, which concepts you want associated with your brand.
2. Improve index stability. Pages that are well-linked internally are more likely to be crawled often – and that means they stay indexed and are likely to show up in AI-generated results. (This is especially for Bing optimization, which seems to struggle more with indexing than Google. Bing is often forgotten when it comes to AEO/GEO because everyone assumes ChatGPT only uses Google, but it doesn’t.)
3. Drive user engagement. Smart placement and descriptive anchors help users explore more of your related content, increasing engagement signals.

Put simply: Internal links aren’t just SEO plumbing. They’re how you build a discoverable, authoritative entity graph inside your own site.

Generative AI being infused into all modalities of search means Google and LLMs aren’t just hiking all over the web searching for crawlable/indexable pages — search engines and LLMs are mapping relationships between entities and judging your brand’s authority accordingly.

But currently, there’s some disagreement on whether or not LLMs can navigate your site through internal links.

My hypothesis? LLMs do form entity relationships via your strategic use of internal links. But probably not through traditionally “crawling” them like search engines do, and more purely based on text signals on the page.

And if that turns out to be true – keeping in mind that LLMs often use search engine results to ground themselves – internal linking also benefits LLM optimization/AEO/GEO mostly by improving Google/Bing ranks, which LLMs heavily rely on.

I dropped the question over on LinkedIn, you can check out the discussion there. But a few responses stood out. (Take a look at the full thread, but I also highly recommend following these pros to learn more from each of them.)

Dan Petrovic, founder and CEO of Dejan SEO, gave a detailed answer about the differences between a) the types of LLM crawlers and b) the different LLMs and how they behave.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Lily Grozeva, head of SEO at Verto Digital, rightfully called out that we can all get the answer in our own logfiles.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Chee Lo, head of SEO at Trustpilot, shared his experience with Perplexity, which seems to be a bit more aggressive than other bots.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

Sites with clear internal linking patterns that mirror how humans connect concepts are (in theory, more data will tell over time) better positioned to be included in AI-generated answers and entity-rich snippets.

Way back in 2019, I explained the following in Semantic content optimization with entities:

Entities are semantic, interconnected objects that help machines to understand explicit and implicit language. In simpler terms, they are words (nouns) that represent any type of object, concept, or subject … According to Cindy Krum and her fantastic entity series, Google seems to restructure its whole approach to indexing based on entities (while you’re at it, read AJ Kohn’s article about embeddings). Understanding entities and how Google uses them in search sharpens our standards for content creation, optimization, and the use of schema markup.

Entities are nouns like events, ideas, people, places, etc. They’re the building blocks of ideas and how those ideas relate to each other. (They’re not just “keywords.”)

Search engines and LLMS use semantic relationships between entities to (1) reduce ambiguity, (2) reinforce authority/canonical sources on your site, and (3) map out relationships between topics, features, services, and audiences across your site.

When you internally link pages together with strategically descriptive anchors, you’re telling search engines how your site fits together … and you’re training them on how entities across your site connect.

Therefore, by practicing internal linking through an entity-based lens, you’re creating stronger, clearer relationships and patterns for Google/search engines/LLMs to understand.

Entity-first SEO starts with defining the people, products, concepts, and places your brand “owns.”

If you’re a B2B SaaS company offering a CRM, those entities might include your:

• Core product (CRM platform).
• Features (pipeline management, email automation, reporting dashboards).
• Use cases (sales enablement, customer support, marketing teams).
• Personas/target ICPs (heads of sales at mid-market companies, startup founders scaling revenue teams, or enterprise IT buyers).

Taking this example, you’re going to think in terms of topic-first SEO:

• Hub or pillar pages = parent entities. These are your central nodes – the definitive resource on a core concept. For a B2B SaaS CRM, it might be the CRM platform overview page.
• Cluster pages = sub-entities. These are the supporting nodes that expand on the hub. For a CRM, the CRM hub branches into feature pages like pipeline management, email automation, and reporting dashboards.
• Cross-link clusters to show relatedness. Don’t just point everything back to the hub – connect the clusters to each other to model real-world relationships. In the instance of the CRM, pipeline management integrates with email automation to shorten deal cycles.
• Navigation and breadcrumbs reinforce hierarchy. The visible structure tells both users and Google how entities fit together. Example: Home → Products → CRM → Pipeline Management.
• Include personas in the implementation. This reinforces the relationship: This persona → has this pain point → solved by this feature → within this product topic.

For example, look at this topic cluster map created with Screaming Frog:

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

It shows two clusters with nodes very close together (red and orange) and three other clusters that are spread apart (green, blue, and purple). Guess which clusters outperform the others in organic search? Red and orange!

Here’s how you connect those entities into a meaningful structure in the copy on the page:

1. Anchor text = entity disambiguation.

Instead of linking with vague text, use descriptive anchors that clarify which entity the link refers to. For example, if your CRM has a feature page about pipeline management, link to it with “sales pipeline management CRM feature” language.

2. Consistency matters.

If you always link to that pipeline management page with variations like “pipeline automation tool,” “deal tracking software,” and “CRM feature,” you dilute the entity connection. (But variations like “pipeline management tool,” “sales pipeline management CRM feature,” and “pipeline management features” are derivatives.)

By sticking to clear, consistent anchors, you signal to Google that this is the page that defines “pipeline management” for your brand.

3. Context strengthens meaning.

The sentence or paragraph around the link can add semantic weight. For example:

“Our CRM includes pipeline management, so your sales team can track every deal from prospecting to close.”

That tells Google (and users) that pipeline management isn’t just a phrase; it’s a core feature within the CRM product.

4. Include personas.

Making personas a criterion for internal linking is a no-brainer, because from a psychological perspective, a link automatically signals “there’s more for you here.”

If your internal link is placed on the right word that triggers a response in your target ICPs (and the right areas of the page), it increases the chance of people staying on the site. It’s also just a better experience – and good customer service – to help site visitors find the right offering specifically for themselves, all with the goal to increase trust and the chances they take an action or convert.

If one of your ICPs is head of Sales at mid-market SaaS companies, you might internally link from a blog article like “10 Ways SaaS Sales Leaders Can Shorten Their Sales Cycle” directly to your pipeline management feature page, while using copy surrounding that link that explains how your offering solves this problem. That link makes the relationship explicit: This is the feature that solves this persona’s pain point.

Ultimately, think of every internal link as a connector in your brand’s knowledge graph.

Together, these links show how entities and topics (like CRM platform → pipeline management → sales enablement → head of sales persona) relate to each other, and why your site is authoritative on them.

Amanda Johnson jumping in here to add: Basically, show + tell people (and search engines/LLMs) what you want them to know via literal semantics. It really is that simple. No need to overthink this. Use clear, descriptive, accurate anchor text for the internally linked page, use it consistently, and give context as to how/why the page is linked there with surrounding copy.

Ultimately, if you practice internal linking thoughtfully and methodically, you end up with a better user experience and more thorough reinforcement of internal entity relationships (which can improve topical authority signals).

Worried that your most important pages aren’t getting enough visibility because you haven’t set up a clear linking structure? Following the guidance above will help you resolve this and set up a clear internal linking system.

And using tools that have internal link auditing (like Semrush, Ahrefs, Clearscope, Surfer, etc.) will help you implement your system. Some SEO tools also give page-level internal linking recommendations and copy suggestions to anchor the text to.

Internal linking hasn’t just been about crawlability for some time now.

By structuring links around topics, entities, (and even user journeys of your target personas), you communicate your site’s semantic map to Google and LLMs.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal