Why an anchor text audit catches things a quick read-through misses
A page can look perfectly fine to a reader while still having a messy underlying link structure — a handful of links with no visible text because they wrap only an image, several links using the same generic "click here" phrasing that gives a reader and a crawler no clue about the destination, or an internal link that was accidentally marked nofollow by a plugin or template default. None of these are visible just by looking at the rendered page, since a reader experiences the link working fine when clicked regardless of what its underlying attributes say.
This tool parses a page's raw HTML using the browser's own DOM parser, finds every anchor tag with an href attribute, and classifies each one as internal or external based on the domain you provide, while also checking its rel attribute for a nofollow value and its visible text for common problems. The summary at the top gives a quick count of each category, and the full table below lists every individual link so you can scan for specific problems rather than just trusting the aggregate numbers.
Reading the internal versus external split
Internal links — links pointing to another page on the same domain — are one of the main ways both readers and crawlers discover the rest of a site's content, and a healthy page usually links to several other relevant internal pages rather than treating every page as an isolated dead end. External links, pointing to other domains, are a normal and often valuable part of good writing when they point to genuinely relevant, high-quality sources, but worth reviewing in bulk occasionally to make sure none point at a domain you no longer intend to be associated with, such as an old partner site or a source that's since become unreliable.
The nofollow count matters because a nofollow link tells search engines not to pass ranking credit through that link, which is standard and appropriate for things like paid or sponsored links, but is sometimes applied by accident to ordinary internal navigation links by an overly broad plugin setting or template rule — worth double-checking if the count of nofollow links looks higher than the number of sponsored or paid links you're aware of on the page.
Fixing empty and generic anchor text
An anchor with no visible text — most often a link that wraps only an image with no accompanying label — gives a screen reader user and a search engine no context about where the link goes, relying entirely on an image's alt text, if one exists, to convey that information. Generic anchor phrases like "click here" or "read more" are a milder version of the same problem: they work for a sighted reader who can see the surrounding sentence, but they carry no topical information on their own, unlike a more specific link such as "our full pricing guide", which describes the destination even out of context. Neither problem is usually severe on its own, but a page with many empty or generic links in a row is a sign the writing leaned on link text as a design element rather than as a genuinely descriptive part of the sentence.