If there’s one optimization factor that’s overlooked more than others, it’s definitely internal links.

Without internal links, search engine algorithms won’t be able to discover the most important pages on your site.

Moreover, internal links spread link equity, reinforce topical authority, and can keep users engaged in your site’s content loop.

Here’s something you may not have known, though.

Internal links are also an important optimization factor in AI search.

The large language models (LLMs) that power platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT use internal links to better understand your content.

In a nutshell, your internal links are like the spine of your website’s knowledge graph.

This article will explore all the ways that internal links benefit organic SEO and AI SEO.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. The SEO value of internal links

2. How internal linking shapes AI understanding

3. The most practical internal linking strategy for 2025

4. Tools, tips, and tricks for internal linking

The SEO Value of Internal Links: How Do They Improve Organic Visibility?

First, let’s go over all the ways internal links can improve your performance and rankings on search engines like Google and Bing.

Bear in mind, we’re talking about the organic search results in this section, and not AI Overviews, since those are powered by LLMs.

Google’s core search algorithm still powers its organic results, and it’s separate from Gemini (Google’s LLM).

Here are all the ways internal links benefit traditional SEO.

More cohesive crawling and indexing

Search engine crawlers use internal links as a guide to discover new pages on your website.

A strong internal linking structure ensures crawlers are able to find and index the pages you want to rank on Google (and other search engines).

Conversely, if you have next-to-no internal links on your site, crawler bots may miss crucial SEO content, like blogs or landing pages.

Orphan pages, which are web pages containing no internal links, are practically invisible to crawler bots and users. If a page is important to your brand’s visibility and sales funnel, it should have lots of internal links pointing at it (at least 5).

Distributing backlink equity to other pages

The concept of distributing ‘link equity’ or ‘link juice’ through websites is still very much alive in the organic SEO world. Here’s a quick refresher if you aren’t familiar with the process.

The highest authority pages on your site (i.e., the ones containing the highest quality backlinks) are able to pass the ‘link juice’ (AKA trust) to other pages via internal links.

This has the potential to improve the keyword rankings for lots of your web pages, not just the ones containing authoritative backlinks.

Utilizing an extensive internal linking strategy will help you get the most out of the link equity you’ve already built.

Reinforcing topical authority

Internal links are absolutely crucial for achieving topical authority with search engines and AI tools.

Essentially, they’re the glue that holds your topical clusters together. Whenever you include internal links to related articles in your content, you’re signaling to search engines that you’re covering your area of expertise in depth.

Here’s an example of some appropriate internal links we included in one of our past blogs:

Here, we’ve linked out to other articles in our library that directly relate to the topic at hand and provide valuable resources to readers.

Google’s algorithm is savvy enough to recognize these links as evidence of topical authority, but they’re only one example. To build the kind of topical authority you need to outrank competitors, your site needs to be filled to the brim with interlinked, interrelated content.

Improving your user experience

Internal links also improve your website’s user experience, something which is crucial to remember.

For example, imagine if a user reading the blog above didn’t know what SEO or GEO were.

Since we’ve included internal links to articles that explain both concepts, it gives readers the chance to educate themselves instead of getting left in the dark.

This brings up an important point: you should think like one of your audience members when placing internal links in your content.

Ask yourself things like:

Do our readers know what this means?

Do we have any relevant content to add further clarification here?

Would someone be able to understand this article with no supplementary resources?

Putting this into practice will help you find the perfect spots for internal links in your articles. Google itself even suggests that you should cross-reference your own content:

As a bonus, adding helpful internal links can improve your dwell times by keeping readers engaged with your content.

Don’t just link to other articles, though.

You can also add internal links to:

• Product pages – Look for instances where it makes sense to link to one of your products (without pushing the sale too hard)

• Landing pages – If you land on a topic that relates to one of your services, don’t forget to include an internal link to the landing page. Remember, you want to make it as easy for your audience to make a purchase as possible!

• Contact forms – There are times when it’s appropriate to recommend a consultation or strategy call to readers (even if it isn’t in the main CTA portion of your article).

This grants you the potential to generate leads and sales straight from your internal links.

How Internal Linking Shapes AI Understanding

Next, let’s take a look at the other side of the coin and see how internal links impact AI search tools.

Whether you’re optimizing for ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews, internal links are a valuable optimization tool for all AI-powered search platforms.

However, internal links are important to LLMs in different ways than search engine algorithms.

Here’s how:

• Internal links clarify content relationships – LLMs use your internal links to find out how your content connects conceptually, semantically, and topically. Proper use of internal links heightens the chances that LLMs will surface your content when generating answers to user prompts.

• They boost AI discoverability – Evidence shows that using internal links can boost your crawl and index frequency on AI platforms (like Perplexity, which crawls and indexes the internet on its own). A study by LLMVisibility found that adding just 3 - 5 contextually relevant internal links led to a 100 – 150% boost in traffic from AI search tools.

• Anchoring topical expertise – Just like with traditional search engines, internal links also reinforce topical authority on AI search platforms. Also, pages with lots of links (both internal links and backlinks) signal credibility to LLMs and are more likely to get cited in responses.

Internal Linking in 2025: A Practical Strategy for AI and SEO

Since internal links can benefit AI visibility and classic SEO, here’s how to develop a strategy that achieves the best of both worlds.

Step #1: Audit your internal link profile

First, you need to evaluate the health of your internal link profile with a comprehensive audit.

You should take this step even if your ultimate goal is to create lots of new, interlinked content. That’s because your website may have orphan pages, broken internal links, and a lack of internal links overall.

Google Search Console comes in handy here.

Its Links Report will let you know:

• Which pages have the most (and least) internal links

• The anchor text for your internal links

• Which pages have no internal links (orphan pages)

SEO spiders like Screaming Frog are also enormously helpful for audits. You can quickly identify things like broken internal links, orphan pages, and crawling errors.

Step #2: Identify core pillar topics

The next steps deal with creating topical clusters to build topical authority with search engines and AI systems.

Once your existing internal link profile is in tip-top shape, you can move on to fleshing out your area of expertise in as much detail as possible.

Here’s the formula:

• Uncover trending topics related to your industry

• Separate them into ‘pillar’ (main) topics and ‘cluster’ (sub) topics

• Create the content and add internal links

It’s important to note that topical depth and contextual relevance are beginning to matter more than targeting individual keywords.

Here are tools you can use to find relevant topics:

• Google Trends

• Hootsuite

• Brand21

• ExplodingTopics

As an example, here are the related queries on Google Trends when we search for ‘fitness’:

The Surfset fitness board is extremely popular right now. If you ran a fitness company, you could capitalize on its popularity by producing a blog post on it, or creating an entire cluster based on surfing as a fitness exercise (how to, benefits, etc.).

Step #3: Develop cluster content and interlink everything

Here’s an example of topic ideas separated into pillars and clusters:

1. Pillar page: AI SEO: The Ultimate Guide in 2025

2. Cluster page: The Role of Vector Search in AI SEO

3. Cluster page: What Makes LLMs Tick? A Deep Dive

4. Cluster page: Prompt Research Tools for AI SEO

5. Cluster page: How Structured Data Enhances AI SEO

As you can see, the pillar page provides a comprehensive overview of a topic, and each pillar page fleshes it out.

In terms of internal links, the pillar page should link to each pillar page whenever each subtopic arises. An example would be linking to the piece on prompt research in a sentence about how prompts are the new keywords.

Conversely, and this is key, each cluster page should also link back to the pillar page.

Also, make use of the RelatedLink (cluster page) and SignificantLink (pillar page) schema types to reflect each link’s importance level.

Final Takeaways: Internal Links for SEO and AI

Regardless of your goals, internal links are an essential component of any AI, SEO, or link-building strategy.

They help users, algorithms, and LLMs better discover your content and understand its relationships, so you should always strive to maintain a healthy internal link profile.

Do you need professional help auditing your link profile?

Get in touch with our team of experts to discover the best path forward for your online visibility.