Suppose ten different websites link to one of your pages. One link uses your brand name, another uses the page title, two use similar keywords, and another simply shows your website address.
Instead of looking at each of those links separately, you can put all of their clickable words together and ask: How are other websites describing this page when they link to it?
Those clickable words are called anchor text. Looking at the different anchors across many backlinks, and seeing which types or phrases appear more often than others, is called analyzing anchor text distribution.
The goal is not to find one perfect percentage. It is to understand what the collection of anchors actually looks like and notice where wording becomes unusually concentrated or repetitive.
Step 1: Collect the Anchors Pointing to the Page
Start by looking at the backlinks pointing to the page you want to analyze.
A backlink is simply a link from another website to that page. The clickable words used in each backlink are called anchor text, and different websites may use different words when linking to the same page.
For example, imagine an Ahrefs page about backlinks. Four different websites might link to that page using:
Ahrefs
backlink guide
learn about backlinks
https://ahrefs.com/
For now, do not worry about what type of anchor each one is or whether one is better than another. The first step is simply to collect the anchors so you can see how different websites are linking to the page.
Step 2: Separate the Anchors Into Types
Now take the four anchors you just collected and look at how they differ.
Ahrefs uses the name of the brand, so it is a branded anchor.
backlink guide describes the subject of the page, so it is a descriptive anchor.
learn about backlinks also describes what the reader can expect to find after clicking, but uses a longer phrase.
https://ahrefs.com/ shows the web address itself, so it is called a naked URL anchor.
Grouping anchors in this way makes a large backlink list easier to understand. Instead of seeing hundreds of individual phrases, you can begin to see which kinds of anchors appear across the backlinks and how often similar wording is used.
Step 3: Look for Wording That Keeps Reappearing
This is where the distribution starts to become useful.
Suppose a page has backlinks from many different websites, but a large number of them use exactly the same keyword phrase.
That repetition is worth noticing.
It does not automatically prove that the links are manipulative. Some wording can repeat for perfectly ordinary reasons, especially when a page, product, organization, or topic has an obvious name.
The important point is that you have found a concentration in the distribution. You can then examine those backlinks more closely instead of deciding that the repeated phrase is automatically a problem.
This is particularly useful when reviewing whether exact match anchors appear repeatedly.
Step 4: Check Where the Repeated Anchors Come From
Finding a repeated phrase is only the beginning.
Now look at the backlinks using it.
Are several links coming from different pages on the same website, or does the wording appear across different websites? Do the links make sense inside the articles where they appear? Does the repeated anchor naturally describe the destination?
These questions add information that a percentage alone cannot give you.
For example, seeing that a phrase represents 20 percent of a small backlink profile tells you something about frequency, but it does not explain why those links use the phrase.
This is why anchor text distribution interpretation requires looking beyond the number itself.
Step 5: Look at the Distribution as a Whole
After checking individual concentrations, step back again.
You should now be able to see how the page is being described across its backlinks.
Perhaps the profile contains brand names, URLs, descriptive phrases, generic wording, and a few exact match keywords. Or perhaps much of the anchor text is concentrated around one or two repeated phrases.
Neither observation gives you a verdict by itself.
There is no publicly documented Google percentage telling you that a backlink profile should contain a particular amount of branded, generic, or keyword anchor text.
What the distribution gives you is a way to identify patterns that deserve a closer look.
If something appears unusually concentrated, you can investigate the links behind that pattern and determine whether there is a reasonable explanation or whether you may be looking at an unnatural anchor text distribution.
You can also compare what you find with the different ways anchor text can appear across a backlink profile.
