Letting Claude Rewrite Your Worst Internal Links

Internal linking is one of those SEO chores everyone agrees is important and almost nobody does well. The advice is always the same: descriptive anchors, link to relevant pages, no orphans. The actual work — finding the bad anchors and rewriting them across hundreds of posts — is what nobody has time for.

Until recently, the answer was either "pay an SEO agency to audit it" or "ignore it and hope for the best." Both options were unsatisfying. The agency report sat in a drawer; the punch list was too tedious to execute.

Now there is a third option that actually feels good to use.

The setup, in one sentence

Install Juicy Links (the analytics) and Connect My Site to AI (the AI bridge), turn on the integration, and your AI assistant — Claude, Cursor, whatever you already use — can audit your internal links inside the conversation you are already having.

Both plugins are free. The AI does the work. You stay in the loop and approve every change.

The first prompt

Give Juicy Links a week to collect real visitor data. Then open your AI assistant and ask something like:

Show me my ten worst-performing internal links — the ones readers see but ignore. Pull the surrounding sentence for each one so we can see why it is failing, and propose a better anchor that fits the prose.

A minute later, you have a punch list. For each cold link, the AI shows you the post, the current anchor, the surrounding sentence, and a proposed rewrite — with a one-line explanation of why the new anchor is better. Something like:

On Easy Italian Biscotti Recipe, the anchor "click here" is doing nothing. Surrounding sentence: "if you have never made biscotti before, the process can feel intimidating — click here for a guide to the equipment that makes it easier." The link points at your stand-mixers guide. Suggested anchor: guide to stand mixers. It tells readers where the link goes, and the surrounding sentence is already trying to introduce that idea.

Multiply by ten links. You have a week's worth of editorial improvements distilled into a single conversation, with the reasoning shown for every suggestion so you can argue back when one feels off.

Approving the rewrites

The AI never silently changes your content. When it has a rewrite ready, it shows you exactly which post it will edit and exactly what the new sentence will look like. You skim the diff. You approve, reject, or ask for a different angle. If you approve, the post saves. If you reject, the AI tries again with your feedback.

For batches, you can ask for a preview of all ten changes at once and approve them as a group — useful when you are confident in the AI's instincts and want to move quickly.

The other things you can ask

Once the analytics are in place, internal-linking conversations open up. A few prompts that work well:

• Find cannibalization. "On this post, find every place where two anchors point at the same destination. Pick the better one to keep based on the surrounding sentences." Two competing links on the same page split your link equity. Picking one and rewriting the other is a concrete improvement most editors never get around to.
• Audit your generic anchors. "Find every anchor on the site that is just 'home', 'here', or 'click'. Suggest a more descriptive replacement based on the surrounding sentence and the destination's title." This single audit can fix dozens of posts in one session.
• Hunt down orphans. "Show me my orphan posts — the ones with zero incoming internal links. For each, suggest a parent post that should link to it based on topic." Orphans are pages Google barely discovers; pointing one good internal link at each is the cheapest SEO improvement on a long-running site.
• Investigate a single post. "Audit every internal link on my biscotti post. For each, tell me whether the anchor matches the surrounding context, and flag anything that should be rewritten." Useful before publishing a high-stakes piece.
• Mobile-vs-desktop weirdness. "Find links where mobile readers click at three times the desktop rate. What is different about those anchors?" Patterns nobody surfaces by hand.

What changes when an AI is in the loop

Two things stand out after running this workflow on a real site for a few weeks.

First, the bottleneck moves. The hard part used to be finding the bad anchors. Now finding them is instant — the bottleneck is reading the AI's proposals and saying yes or no. That is a much better problem to have, because it is a problem an editor can actually finish in an afternoon.

Second, the suggestions get better the more context you give. Tell the AI your site's voice, your audience, your style guide — once, at the start of a session — and the proposals adjust accordingly. That is something no SEO tool can do and no scoring formula can approximate.

How it compares to the SaaS alternatives

You can do most of this with a paid SaaS internal-linking tool. Link Whisper, Internal Link Juicer Pro, others. They cost $80-200/year, run in their own dashboard, and cap their suggestions at "change this anchor to this token" — no surrounding-sentence awareness, no understanding of your site's voice, and certainly no integration with the AI assistant you are already using.

The Juicy Links plus Connect My Site to AI combo is free for the read side (audit, find, propose) and only needs a Pro license for the write side if you want the AI to apply rewrites and reset stats automatically. For comparison: Connect My Site to AI Pro is $49/year and unlocks 50+ other write tools across the rest of your WordPress install — internal-link rewrites are one capability among many.

The free download

Juicy Links is 100% free. Connect My Site to AI is also free to install — the read tools work without a license. Together they turn an "I should really audit my internal links someday" task into a thirty-minute editorial conversation with your AI of choice.

Companion read: Why I stopped letting a plugin decide my internal links — the design story behind the analytics-only approach.