What it is
Internal links are simply links that point from one page on your site to another page on that same site — a link in your navigation menu, a "related articles" link, a mention of another page inside your body text, or a link in your footer. This is distinct from external links, which point to a different website entirely.
This check looks at whether a page has a reasonable number of internal links pointing both to and from it, rather than sitting as an isolated page that nothing else on the site links to and that doesn't link onward to anything else.
Why it matters
Search engines primarily discover new pages by following links, so a page with no internal links pointing to it can be considerably harder to find and index, even if it's technically live and listed in a sitemap. Internal links also help search engines understand which pages on a site are the most important — pages that get linked to often, from many other pages, tend to be treated as more central to the site.
For an actual visitor, internal links are just as important for an entirely separate reason: they're how someone browsing one page discovers that other relevant pages exist at all, rather than leaving after reading just the one page they landed on.
How to fix it
- Make sure every important page is reachable from your main navigation menu, not just from a direct link shared elsewhere.
- Within body content, link naturally to other relevant pages on your site where it makes sense — for example, a blog post mentioning a product could link directly to that product's page.
- Add a footer with links to key pages (About, Contact, Privacy Policy, main sections) so they're reachable from anywhere on the site.
- Avoid orphan pages — pages that exist and are published but that nothing else on the site links to.
- Re-run your Launch Readiness check to confirm a healthy number of internal links are now detected.