Link Text That Isn't "Click Here" (and Why It Matters)

There’s a habit almost every website picks up at some point: writing a sentence, and then bolting “click here” onto the end of it as the link. To read the details, click here. For pricing, click here. It looks harmless. It’s actually one of the clearest examples I know of a small writing choice quietly excluding people.

Here’s the thing most people don’t know about how blind users actually browse. Screen readers don’t read a page top to bottom like an audiobook, at least not most of the time. Experienced users skim, the same way you do. One of the main ways they skim is by pulling up a list of every link on the page and jumping through it. The screen reader reads each link’s text, one after another, stripped of everything around it. Now imagine what that list sounds like on a page full of “click here” links. Click here. Click here. Learn more. Click here. Read more. It’s a menu where every item is called “food.”

The sentence around the link, the part that explains where it goes, is gone. It was never part of the link. So the person navigating by links has to back out, find each link in the surrounding text, and reconstruct the context by hand. That’s the accessibility guideline in plain English, by the way. WCAG asks that the purpose of a link be clear from the link text itself, or at least from the text right around it. Not because standards bodies enjoy rules, but because links are one of the few elements that routinely get read out of context, and text that only works in context breaks the moment you lift it out.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Move the link to the words that describe the destination. Instead of “To see our pricing, click here,” write “See our pricing,” and link the whole phrase. Instead of “Click here to download the report,” write “Download the 2026 report.” The sentence usually gets shorter, which is its own reward. I’ve never once seen this fix make copy worse. It’s one of those rare changes with no tradeoff.

What convinced me this matters beyond accessibility is noticing who else reads links out of context. Search engines do. The text inside a link is one of the signals they use to understand what the destination page is about. A hundred links that say “click here” tell Google the page they point to is about clicking. A link that says “wedding photography pricing” tells it something useful. Anchor text has been a ranking input since the beginning of search, so vague link text is a small SEO leak on top of an accessibility failure. The same words are doing double duty, or failing at double duty.

And sighted skimmers read links out of context too. Links are usually the visually loudest text on a page: colored, underlined, different from everything around them. When someone scans a page, their eye snags on links first. If your links are all “here” and “more,” you’ve highlighted the least informative words on the page. The reader’s eye lands on them and learns nothing. If your links are “pricing,” “case studies,” “book a call,” the page skims itself. You’ve effectively built a table of contents out of your own emphasis, for free.

Once you start noticing this, you see the pattern everywhere, and you see its cousins. “Read more” under every blog card, so a screen reader hears “read more” nine times with no hint of which article is which. “Learn more” as the label on every product tile. Buttons that just say “Submit,” so the confirmation-of-what is anyone’s guess. The underlying mistake is the same each time: the meaning lives in the surrounding layout or copy, and the interactive element itself is mute. Assistive tech, search crawlers, and skimming eyes all consume interactive elements in isolation. Whatever isn’t in the element is invisible to them.

When I built GazeSite I made vague link text one of the things the scan flags, and it shows up constantly, on polished sites, on sites that clearly had money spent on them. I think that’s because no one ever decided to write “click here.” It accretes. A marketer writes a sentence, a developer needs something to wrap the anchor tag around, “click here” is sitting right there, and nobody’s job is to read the page as a list of links. The failure is invisible unless you consume the page the way an excluded user does.

Which suggests the cheapest audit you can run on your own site: open a page and read only the links, in order, ignoring everything else. If that reading tells you what the page offers and where each path leads, your links are good. If it’s a chant of here, here, more, here, you’ve found ten minutes of editing that will help blind visitors, search rankings, and every skimmer at once. There aren’t many fixes that pay three ways. This one does, and it costs nothing but attention.