Ahrefs Internal Links: How to Find, Check, and Fix Them

Ahrefs internal links do get counted, but not in the same place as backlinks. They show up in dedicated reports built specifically for tracking how pages on one website connect to each other, and that separation trips up a lot of people the first time they go looking.

What Counts as an Internal Link in Ahrefs

An internal link, in Ahrefs, is any hyperlink that connects one page to another page on the same domain. A blog post linking to another blog post on the same site counts.

A category page linking to a product page counts. A footer link pointing to your contact page counts too.That's different from a backlink, which comes from a separate website entirely.

Ahrefs treats these as two different signals because they do two different jobs. Backlinks are usually read as trust signals from outside your site. Internal links do something quieter but no less useful: they tell search engines, and readers, how your own content fits together.

This distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Teams commonly report confusion the first time they check a page's "link count" and get a number that doesn't match what they expected, only to realize they were looking at backlinks, not internal links, or the other way round.

Where to Find Ahrefs Internal Links Data

There are three main places inside Ahrefs where this data lives, and each one answers a slightly different question.

Internal Backlinks Report (Site Explorer)

Inside Site Explorer, there's a report labeled Internal Backlinks. It lists the source page, the target page, the anchor text used, and whether the link is still live. This is the report most people mean when they ask where their internal links are.

What It Shows

For any URL you enter, this report pulls up every page on the same domain that links to it, along with the anchor text used to make that connection. If a page is barely linked from anywhere else on the site, this is usually where that becomes obvious.

How It Differs From the Main Backlinks Report

The regular Backlinks report only shows links coming in from other domains. Internal Backlinks filters specifically for links from within your own site.

Mixing these two up is one of the more common misreadings of Ahrefs data, and it's an easy mistake to make since both reports live under Site Explorer.

Internal Link Data in Site Audit

Site Audit runs its own crawl of your website, separate from Ahrefs' general web crawler.

Because it's crawling your site directly rather than discovering it through the open web, it tends to catch links that the broader crawler misses, including ones buried deep in navigation or content.

Custom Crawl vs. Global Crawl

Site Explorer's internal link data comes from Ahrefs' general crawler, which finds your site the way it finds any other site on the internet. Site Audit instead crawls your domain specifically when you run it, following every link it can reach from your homepage or sitemap.

In practice, this usually means Site Audit surfaces a more complete internal link picture, particularly for larger sites.

Issues It Can Surface

Site Audit is where orphan pages show up, meaning pages with no internal links pointing to them at all. It also flags broken internal links, and pages that seem to have unusually few or unusually many internal links compared to the rest of the site.

Best by Links (Filtered to Internal)

There's a report called Best by Links that, when filtered to internal links, shows which pages on your site receive the most internal link support.

Homepages, main category pages, and long-standing cornerstone content tend to top this list, which makes sense since they're the pages most other content naturally points back to.

How Ahrefs Discovers Internal Links

Ahrefs finds internal links through a fairly standard crawling process: it visits a URL, scans the page's HTML for hyperlinks, records where those links point, and follows new links it finds to keep expanding its map of the site.

According to TechCrunch, this crawling is handled by Ahrefs' own crawler, AhrefsBot, which the company has said visits billions of web pages every 24 hours to keep its index current.

What's often overlooked is that this process has limits. Pages blocked by robots.txt won't get crawled.

Links generated through complex JavaScript can be missed by less capable crawlers, though Ahrefs does render JavaScript and will tag links it had to execute code to find. Recently published pages might not show up until the next crawl cycle either.

None of this means the data is wrong, exactly, just that it reflects what Ahrefs could reach at the time it crawled, not necessarily everything that exists right now.

Step-by-Step: How to Check Internal Links in Ahrefs

Step 1: Log In and Open Site Explorer

Start from the Ahrefs dashboard and open Site Explorer, which is the main tool for looking up data on a domain or a single URL.

Step 2: Enter a Domain or Specific URL

Enter your full domain if you want a broad view of internal linking across the whole site, or a single page URL if you're checking how well one specific page is supported internally.

Step 3: Open the Internal Backlinks Report

Once the data loads, navigate to the Internal Backlinks report. This is where the source pages, target pages, and anchor text all live.

Step 4: Review Source Pages, Anchor Text, and Relevance

Go through the list and check whether the pages linking in are actually relevant to the target page, and whether the anchor text used makes sense in context.

Vague anchor text, or links coming from unrelated pages, are both worth a second look.

Step 5: Run Site Audit for a Full-Site Analysis

For a wider view, run a Site Audit. This gives a fuller picture than Site Explorer alone, since it's crawling your site directly.

Step 6: Identify Orphan Pages, Broken Links, and Under-Linked Pages

Inside Site Audit, look specifically for orphan pages, broken internal links, and pages sitting well below the site's average internal link count. These three issues tend to cause the most practical harm to crawlability.

How to Find Internal Linking Opportunities in Ahrefs

Ahrefs also has a Link Opportunities report inside Site Audit, and it works a bit differently from the reports above. Instead of just counting existing links, it looks at the keywords a page already ranks for, then scans other pages on your site for mentions of those same keywords that haven't been turned into links yet.

Reading the Ahrefs Internal Links Suggestion Fields

Each suggestion includes a source page, meaning where the new link would be added, a destination page, meaning the page that would benefit from it, and a suggested anchor text based on the existing keyword mention.

Applying a Suggested Link

From there, it's a matter of opening the source page, adding a contextual link to the destination, and making sure the anchor text reads naturally rather than feeling dropped in.

In practice, most of these suggestions are usable as-is, though it's still worth checking that the surrounding sentence actually supports the link before publishing it.

Backlinks vs. Internal Links in Ahrefs

Feature	Backlinks	Internal Links
Source	External websites	Same website
Primary function	Authority and trust signal	Site structure and navigation
Where shown in Ahrefs	Backlinks report	Internal Backlinks report, Site Audit
Discovery method	Global web crawl	Global crawl plus site-specific crawl (Site Audit)

Keeping these two apart matters mostly because they get reported on separately. A site with a strong backlink profile can still have a messy internal link structure, and Ahrefs won't blend the two into one number that hides that.

What This Data Is Generally Understood to Support

This next part reflects broader, generally accepted SEO understanding rather than something Ahrefs states outright about its own scoring.

Site Structure and Crawlability

Search engines rely partly on internal links to find and revisit pages. A page with no internal links pointing to it is harder to discover, and harder to recrawl regularly once it has been.

Distribution of Authority Between Pages

Industry practice generally treats internal linking as a way to pass some authority from stronger, well-linked pages to weaker ones, an idea rooted in link-analysis concepts like PageRank.

According to Wikipedia, PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to estimate how important that page is, on the assumption that more important pages tend to attract more links.

Ahrefs does not publish the exact mechanics of how it weighs internal links, so this connection is best treated as a widely observed pattern rather than a confirmed part of Ahrefs' own scoring.

Helping Search Engines Identify Important Pages

Pages that receive links from many places across a site tend to be read as more central to that site's content, simply because more of the site is pointing toward them.

Common Internal Linking Issues Ahrefs Can Surface

• Orphan pages, meaning pages with zero internal links pointing to them
• Broken internal links, usually links pointing to a page that returns a 404
• Pages with unusually few internal links relative to the rest of the site
• Pages with an excessive number of internal links, which can dilute the value of each one
• Internal links accidentally marked nofollow, which stops them from passing any signal

Basic Practices for Reviewing Internal Links in Ahrefs

Descriptive anchor text tends to hold up better over time than generic phrases like "click here," partly because it gives both readers and crawlers more context about what they're clicking into.

Linking from pages Ahrefs shows as having strong internal link counts toward pages that need more support is a reasonable starting point, though it's worth checking relevance first rather

than linking purely based on a report number.

Regular audits catch problems early. Organisations in this space typically find that internal link issues creep in gradually, usually after a site redesign, a URL change, or months of publishing without revisiting older content, rather than appearing all at once.

Forced or irrelevant links are generally worth avoiding. A link that doesn't fit the sentence it's placed in tends to read as odd to a human reader, whatever value it might carry.

Conclusion

Ahrefs internal links are tracked, just not inside the Backlinks report. Site Explorer's Internal Backlinks report, Site Audit, and Best by Links each show a different angle of the same underlying data, and checking all three gives the fullest picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Ahrefs count internal links as backlinks?

No. Backlinks come from external websites, while internal links connect pages on the same domain. Ahrefs tracks both, but reports on them separately rather than combining them into one figure.

Where can I see internal links pointing to a specific page?

Open Site Explorer, enter the page URL, and check the Internal Backlinks report. It lists every page on the same site linking to that URL, along with anchor text.

Can Ahrefs detect orphan pages automatically?

Yes. Site Audit can identify pages that receive no internal links from anywhere else on the site during its crawl, which is generally how orphan pages get flagged.

How often does Ahrefs update internal link data?

Data updates whenever Ahrefs' crawler revisits a site. Larger or more frequently updated sites tend to get crawled more often than smaller, static ones.

Why might the internal link count for a page change over time?

Counts shift after a new crawl if pages get added, removed, or restructured. A site redesign or URL change is a common cause of sudden shifts.