Naked URL anchor
A naked URL anchor is a link whose clickable text is the raw web address itself, such as https://example.com, rather than descriptive words.
Naked URLs appear constantly in the wild: people paste a link into a forum, a comment, a social post, or a press release without bothering to write anchor text around it. Because no human deliberately optimised the wording, search engines treat naked URLs as a natural, low-risk signal. They carry almost no keyword relevance, but that is exactly why they look organic.
In a healthy anchor text profile, naked URLs typically make up a meaningful share alongside branded anchor text and generic anchor phrases. Their value is in dilution: when a site has too many keyword-rich anchors, adding naked and branded links pulls the ratios back toward something Google considers safe and reduces over optimization risk.
One practical nuance: a bare domain like example.com is often counted as a branded signal because the brand name lives inside the URL, while a long deep-link path reads as a purer naked anchor. Do not chase a precise percentage; the point is that naked URLs should occur naturally and never be forced to hit a target.