Brand X anchored 40% exact-match and wondered why

Brand X anchored 40% exact-match and wondered why

Still happening in 2026. Pulled an anchor-text cloud this week on a loans brand and 38% of it was the same money phrase — the kind of distribution that screams "we paid for these" to anything Google trains on.

Clean profiles in competitive verticals sit at single-digit exact-match. Multiple top-three players show the inverse pyramid: branded and naked-URL anchors carrying the weight, money anchors a thin slice on top.

The fix the careful ones run —
— Export your anchor distribution and benchmark it against the actual SERP leaders, not a guru's rule of thumb. The ratio is vertical-specific.
— When you commission links, dictate the anchor mix in the brief. Letting writers "pick a good keyword" is how you build a footprint.

The footprint you can see is the footprint they can see. Watch this space.