In this report 8 sections
How sites score
The Silotree Score rates a site’s internal links from 0 to 100: whether posts have links in from other posts, whether those links work, whether readers can reach every post in a few clicks, and whether posts are grouped into topics. It counts only links inside article text, never menus, footers or sidebars, and the formula is published.
Across 39 sites the median score is 52, with the middle half of sites between 43 and 61.5. One site in ten scores under 30.8, and one in ten over 72.
The numbers
| Score | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0–9 | 1 | 3% |
| 10–19 | 1 | 3% |
| 20–29 | 2 | 5% |
| 30–39 | 5 | 13% |
| 40–49 | 7 | 18% |
| 50–59 | 10 | 26% |
| 60–69 | 8 | 21% |
| 70–79 | 5 | 13% |
| 80–89 | 0 | 0% |
| 90–100 | 0 | 0% |
| Band | Score | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strong | 90–100 | 0 | 0% |
| Good | 75–89 | 3 | 8% |
| Needs work | 50–74 | 20 | 51% |
| Weak | 0–49 | 16 | 41% |
Not counted: 6 sites with fewer than five posts, which get no score, and 1 whose pages had no article text we could read.
The four parts
The score is four parts, each out of 100 and weighted into the total. Comparing the parts shows where sites lose their points.
The numbers
| Part | Sites | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reachable | 39 | 38 | 76 | 96 |
| Linked | 39 | 7 | 27 | 36.5 |
| Working links | 39 | 77.5 | 95 | 98.5 |
| Organised | under 10 | — | — | — |
Linked is where the typical site has most room to improve, at a median of 27. Organised needs a site’s posts grouped into topics, a step this crawl didn’t run, so it isn’t in this edition.
Unlinked posts
An unlinked post is a post no other post links to from inside its article text (what SEO writers call an orphan page). Readers can only find it through menus, archives, search or the sitemap, and nothing in your own writing points them, or a crawler following your links, to it.
- 56% no links in (unlinked)
- 32% one or two links in
- 12% three or more links in
The numbers
| Links in | Posts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| No links in (unlinked) | 2,921 | 56% |
| One or two links in | 1,668 | 32% |
| Three or more links in | 601 | 12% |
Of 5,190 posts, 2,921 (56%) had no link in, and another 1,668 (32%) had only one or two. Big sites weigh more in that total, so per site: the median site has 60% of its posts unlinked, with the middle half of sites between 36% and 87%.
38 of 39 sites (97%) had at least one unlinked post, and on 24 (62%) half or more of the posts were unlinked.
Click depth and broken links
- 58%of posts were within three clicks of the home page, on the 39 sites where we could count clicks from it.
- 49%of sites had at least one link in their articles pointing at a missing page (19 of 39). That was 538 broken links out of 12,113, 236 of them on a single site.
- 11%went through a redirect before reaching the page. They work, but cost a step every time.
What to fix first
For every site, the score works out which single fix would add the most points. Counting those across sites shows what most sites should do first.
- Give unlinked posts a link in59% (23 sites)
- Add links to posts with only one or two23% (9 sites)
- Bring deep posts closer to the home page13% (5 sites)
- Point broken and redirected links straight at the page5% (2 sites)
Does linking go with search traffic?
This is the question that matters: within the same site, do posts with more links in get more clicks from Google? We compare posts on the same site only, so a big, old site is never compared with a new one, and hold word count, click depth and the post’s age level.
Not yet: too little data to say
Search traffic is private to each site, so it can only come from sites whose owners connect Search Console to Silotree. None of the crawled sites have. Answering it needs Search Console data on at least 30 sites and about 787 posts, compared within each site. So far 0 sites and 0 posts qualify, so this edition reports no result rather than a weak one.
Those targets were set before we looked at any data, from a standard power calculation: about 787 posts to detect a small association, spread over at least 30 sites so no single site carries the result. The next edition will report the answer whichever way it comes out.
Even with plenty of data, this compares posts as they are. It can show that well-linked posts go with more clicks; it can’t show that adding a link causes them. Authors link to their best and most popular posts, which produces the same pattern. The Silotree Score is not an SEO score and doesn’t predict a site’s traffic.
Method and limits
The short version. The full method, with every model and threshold, is on its own page.
- Sample. 46 public WordPress sites, drawn at random from the Tranco top 1M list of popular websites (list GQG5K, 19 October 2026). We put the list in a random order and kept the first 170 sites whose home page loaded WordPress files, which took checking 1,451. Each was crawled once by Silotree’s crawler, the same crawl as the free audit, reading up to 500 pages. 112 sites were bigger than that. A partial crawl makes posts look unlinked when the posts linking to them weren’t read, so those sites are left out, and this edition describes the 46 sites we could read in full, which are the smaller ones. 12 sites couldn’t be crawled (they refused, failed, or asked crawlers to wait minutes between pages) and are left out too.
- Posts. Indexable posts in each site’s latest crawl: not the home page, archives, or pages marked noindex. Links are counted only inside article text.
- Score. The Silotree Score, formula version 1, exactly as published. Sites with fewer than five posts get no score and are left out of the score figures.
- Figures. Medians and percentiles are across sites, interpolated between neighbouring values. No site is named, and no figure is published from fewer than 10 sites.
- Search. Search Console clicks over 28 days, from sites whose owners connected it. Posts are compared within each site, with word count, click depth and age held level.
Cite this report
You’re welcome to quote any figure here, with a link to this page.
Silotree (2026). The state of internal linking 2026. https://silotree.io/research/internal-linking-2026Every figure comes from one run of our study code on 20 October 2026. The aggregates are downloadable as JSON (fingerprint 836879eba5e6), released under CC BY 4.0.