Internal Linking Automation: Auto-Link New and Existing Posts
Internal links improve SEO, keep visitors on your site longer, and help Google understand your content structure. AIWU can automatically find and insert relevant internal links into your posts — both during generation and retroactively across existing content. This guide covers both workflows.
Before You Start
You’ll need:
- Familiar with bulk content generation (Bulk Article Creation guide)
- AIWU Pro with API key configured
- At least 10–15 published posts (internal linking is most valuable once you have a content library)
- Time needed: 10 minutes setup · runs automatically after that
- Plan required: Pro
How AIWU Internal Linking Works
AIWU analyzes your published posts and builds a semantic index of your content library. When generating or updating a post, it finds relevant articles based on topic similarity and inserts contextual links using natural anchor text — not forced keyword stuffing.
Option A: Auto-Link During Content Generation
Enable this so every new article gets internal links automatically when generated.
Go to AI Copilot → Content Generation → Settings. Under the Internal Linking section:
- Enable internal linking: On
- Links per article: 3–5 (too many links dilute value; too few miss opportunities)
- Minimum similarity score: 0.75 (only links to genuinely relevant articles)
- Exclude from linking: Homepage, contact page, privacy policy (add these to the exclusion list)
- Open in new tab: Off for internal links (SEO best practice — keep visitors in the same tab)
Now every article generated through AIWU will automatically include relevant internal links to your existing content.
Option B: Add Internal Links to Existing Posts (Bulk Retroactive)
This is valuable if you have a content library without internal links, or if you’ve recently published new articles that older posts should link to.
Go to AI Copilot → Content Generation → Internal Linking → Bulk Update.
Configure the update:
| Setting | Recommended | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Which posts to update | All published posts | Or select by category for targeted runs |
| Links per post | 2–4 | Lower for shorter posts, higher for long-form |
| Minimum word count to link | 300 words | Skip very short posts — they have less context for relevant linking |
| Overwrite existing links | Off | Preserve manually placed links |
| Create backup before update | On | Allows rollback if results aren’t satisfactory |
Click Start Bulk Update. The process runs in the background. For large sites (500+ posts) this may take an hour or more.
Option C: Add Internal Links to a Single Post Manually
For fine-grained control on individual posts:
- Open the post in the WordPress editor
- Look for the AI Internal Links panel in the sidebar (added by AIWU)
- Click Find Internal Links — AIWU analyzes the post and suggests 5–10 relevant articles with suggested anchor text
- Check the ones you want to insert and click Insert Selected Links
- Update the post
Pillar + Cluster Linking Strategy
For the strongest SEO impact, configure your most important posts as “pillar pages” — everything else links to them:
- Go to Internal Linking → Pillar Pages
- Add your 3–5 most important posts (main category pages, cornerstone content)
- Enable Always link to pillar pages: On — AIWU will ensure every relevant post links to these pages
This builds strong topical authority around your core content.
Verify It’s Working
After setting up, open any recently generated or updated post and look for hyperlinks within the body content. Hover over them — they should link to other posts on your site with natural, contextual anchor text.
Common Issues
Problem: “Links are being inserted but they don’t seem relevant to the paragraph.”
Fix: Increase the minimum similarity score to 0.80. Lower scores link more aggressively but with less precision.
Problem: “The same posts get linked to over and over while others are never linked.”
Fix: Enable Distribute links evenly in settings — this caps how many times any single post can receive new internal links in one run.
Problem: “Bulk update ran but I don’t see new links in posts.”
Fix: Clear your site cache. Check whether the minimum similarity threshold is too high — try lowering to 0.70. Also verify that your content library is indexed (go to Internal Linking → Rebuild Index).
What’s Next
- 📝 Update old posts with new content too: Bulk Update Old Posts with AI
- 📦 Generate new content to link to: Bulk Article Creation
- ✍️ Improve prompts for better generated content: Better AI Prompts guide
Last verified: AIWU v.4.9.2 · Updated: 2026-02-25