The AI Linking Strategist analyzes content using topic-based matching to find linking opportunities. When you generate or view content, the system:
Every piece of content gets analyzed for key topics. The system stores these topics in the content record for fast matching later.
Example: An article about "Sustainable Swimwear Materials" might extract topics like:
The system uses Jaccard similarity to measure topic overlap between articles. If two pieces share 3 out of 5 topics, that's a 60% match—strong enough to recommend linking.
Minimum threshold: 50% topic similarity. Anything below this gets filtered out.
The system generates anchor text by:
Example: If your article mentions "recycled swimwear fabrics" and you have another article titled "The Complete Guide to Recycled Fabrics," the anchor text becomes "recycled swimwear fabrics."
Before suggesting a link, the system verifies:
Suggestions with invalid anchor text get filtered out entirely—you only see links that can actually be implemented.
What this content should link TO.
When viewing an article, you see suggestions for existing content you should link to from this piece. These appear in the "Linking Suggestions" panel.
Use case: You just published "Summer Swimwear Trends 2026." The system suggests linking to your older articles about specific trend categories mentioned in the new piece.
What should link TO this content.
The system identifies existing articles that mention topics covered in your new content. These are opportunities to update old articles with links to new ones.
Use case: Your new article covers "ECONYL fabric benefits." The system finds 5 older articles that mention ECONYL and suggests adding a link to your new deep-dive guide.
Tier requirement: Professional and Enterprise tiers get retroactive linking. Starter tier only gets outbound suggestions.
Links within content packages.
If you generate a content package (pillar + infographics + archetypes), the system automatically suggests cross-links between package pieces.
Package structure:
All pieces in the package get linking suggestions to sibling pieces—but only if valid anchor text exists in the source content.
Links to products, collections, and services.
If you've connected Shopify or WooCommerce, the system suggests links to relevant products/collections based on topic overlap.
Example: An article about "High-Waisted Bikini Styles" gets suggestions to link to your High-Waisted Bikini Collection and individual product pages that match the article's topics.
How it works:
Open any piece of content in the Content Hub and scroll to the "Linking Suggestions" section. You'll see:
Each suggestion shows:
Future versions will support one-click link insertion directly into content HTML.
Good anchors:
Bad anchors:
The system filters bad anchors automatically, but if you manually create links, prefer 2-4 word descriptive phrases.
Recommended: 3-5 internal links per 1,000 words.
Too few links = missed opportunity for SEO and user navigation. Too many links = looks spammy, dilutes link equity.
Only link when semantically relevant. Don't force links to hit a quota. If the system suggests 8 links but only 3 feel natural, use those 3.
SEO benefit: Search engines reward contextually relevant internal links. Random links hurt more than they help.
If working with content packages, prioritize package links first:
Package links create topic clusters—a strong SEO signal.
| Feature | Starter | Professional | Enterprise |
|---------|---------|--------------|------------|
| Outbound suggestions | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Resource suggestions | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Package suggestions | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Retroactive (inbound) | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Cross-brand linking | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
Starter: New content gets outbound suggestions only. Professional: New content triggers retroactive updates to old content. Enterprise: Multi-tenant linking across brand portfolio.
Lower threshold = more suggestions but lower relevance. Higher threshold = fewer suggestions but stronger semantic connection.
The system analyzes up to 100 candidate articles per query. For large content libraries (1,000+ articles), the system prioritizes:
If a piece doesn't have extracted topics (e.g., content imported before you started using ILLIXIS), the system falls back to keyword matching based on titles and content text. This ensures your entire library gets linking suggestions, not just newer content.
Internal linking runs on automated schedules to keep your link graph current without manual intervention.
Schedule: Weekly on Fridays at 3:00 AM UTC
The full internal link graph rebuilds every week. This recalculates:
Why Friday: Allows the system to process your week's content before the weekend, so Monday dashboards show fresh linking opportunities.
Schedule: Within 1 hour of publish
When you publish new content, the system queues a linking analysis task. Within 60 minutes:
No action required: Suggestions appear automatically in the Content Detail view.
Schedule: Daily at 4:00 AM UTC
The system crawls all internal links to detect:
Broken links appear in your Content Health dashboard with suggested fixes.
Schedule: Weekly with link graph rebuild (Fridays at 3:00 AM UTC)
Orphan pages—content with zero internal links pointing to it—get flagged during the weekly rebuild. These represent SEO opportunities since search engines may struggle to discover orphaned content.
Dashboard location: Content Hub → Linking Health → Orphan Pages
Likely causes:
Fix: Ensure content has been fully processed for topic extraction. Regenerate content if topics are missing.
The validation filter checks if suggested anchor text exists in source content. If suggestions appear empty, the anchor validation likely failed.
Fix: Edit content to naturally include terms from target article topics. The system will detect the match on next analysis.
If suggestions link to barely-related content, check topic extraction quality.
Fix: Review the topics extracted for your content. If topics are too generic ("guide", "tips", "best"), regenerate the content with more specific topic guidance.
Planned features:
Monitor your keyword positions over time, spot trends before they become problems, and get alerted when rankings shift.
Google Search Console GSC provides search performance data that powers ILLIXIS features like content decay detection, competitive gap discovery, and Maya's search opportunity recommendations.
A Keyword Brief is your strategic foundation for content creation. Enter a keyword and ILLIXIS analyzes the search landscape, identifies what's ranking, spots competitive gaps, and generates a comprehensive creative strategy.
SERP Intelligence analyzes Google's top 100 search results to reveal competitive landscape data for your target keywords. This intelligence powers strategic decisions about word count, content structure, and positioning.
Keyword Discovery expands your SEO keyword universe by finding related terms, questions, and long-tail variations from seed keywords. AI filtering removes irrelevant results, leaving actionable keyword opportunities.
One platform. You approve. ILLIXIS executes. Marketing that just happens.
Marketing, Unstacked.