Readable Links: Descriptive, Not Decorative

A link is the smallest piece of writing on the web that carries a real obligation. It’s a promise: click this, and you’ll get that. And yet most links on most pages refuse to say what “that” is. They say “click here.” They say “learn more.” They say “read this.” These links have the grammar of a promise and the content of a shrug.

I notice this because the audit tool I built keeps flagging it, on site after site, and because once you see it you can’t stop seeing it. Pull up almost any company website and collect just the link texts, ignoring everything around them. On a good site, that list reads like a table of contents: pricing, documentation, case study with a named customer, the changelog, the security page. On a typical site it reads like this: learn more, learn more, click here, read more, here, more. A list of gestures pointing at nothing.

The standard defense is that context makes it clear. The link says “learn more,” but it sits under a paragraph about the enterprise plan, so obviously it leads to the enterprise plan. This defense assumes the reader read the paragraph. On the web, that assumption fails most of the time, and it fails in three specific ways worth taking one at a time.

The first is the skimmer. People scanning a page don’t process it linearly; their eyes jump to whatever stands out, and links stand out by design — they’re colored, often underlined, visually louder than the text around them. Which means for a skimmer, your link texts are effectively your page’s headline layer. They get read out of context because they get read first. “Learn more” read first, before its paragraph, carries zero information. “Compare plans and pricing” read first tells the skimmer exactly what’s behind the door, and whether they care. The descriptive link works at both speeds; the decorative one works at neither, because even careful readers gain nothing from it.

The second is the screen reader user. Blind and low-vision users often navigate by pulling up a list of all the links on a page and jumping straight to the one they need — it’s the audio equivalent of skimming. In that list, every link appears stripped of its surroundings. A page whose links all say “click here” becomes, in this view, literally unusable: a menu where every item has the same name. This is why the accessibility guidelines ask that a link’s purpose be determinable from its text. It isn’t bureaucratic fussiness. It’s the direct consequence of how the page is actually consumed by someone who can’t see the paragraph next door.

The third is the search engine, which reads your site more like a screen reader than like a sighted human. The words inside a link are treated as a description of the page being linked to; that’s a large part of how crawlers understand what pages are about. When your internal links say “click here,” you are telling the machines that your pricing page is about clicking. When they say “pricing,” you’ve labeled the page correctly, in the one place the label counts most.

So three very different readers — the hurried, the blind, and the algorithmic — all fail on the same link text for the same underlying reason: the information was in the surroundings, and they only got the link. The fix is one fix. Move the destination into the link itself. Instead of “To see our API documentation, click here,” write “Read the API documentation” and link that whole phrase. The sentence gets shorter, the promise gets explicit, and all three readers are served by the same seven words.

There’s a small craft to it. Link the noun phrase that names the destination, not the verb ceremony around it — “the security overview,” not “you can view.” Keep it short enough to scan but long enough to be honest; a single word like “here” is too little, an entire linked sentence is a blue smear that’s hard to read. Front-load the distinctive word, because that’s what the eye and the ear both catch. And never give the same text to links with different destinations. Two links that both say “documentation” but go to different products are a promise broken twice.

What strikes me is why decorative links happen at all, because nobody sits down intending to write them. I think “learn more” is what writers reach for when they haven’t decided what the reader will learn. It’s the hyperlink equivalent of “stuff” — a placeholder that never got replaced. Writing a descriptive link forces a small act of honesty: you have to know where the link goes and why anyone would follow it, and you have to say so in a few words. Sometimes you try to write that link and find you can’t, because the destination page doesn’t really offer anything you can name. That’s not a link problem. That’s the link doing its job as a smoke detector.

A page’s links, collected together, are a compressed statement of what the site actually offers. Making each one descriptive is minutes of work. It’s some of the cheapest writing improvement available, and it pays out to every kind of reader you have.