What internal linking actually does
Search engines use internal links to discover new pages and to gauge relative importance: a page linked from many places across the site, especially from other high-authority pages, reads as more important than one buried with zero internal links pointing to it.
The same links help an AI system's retrieval step build a map of related content on your site — which matters when a user's question could be answered by any one of several pages, and the model needs a signal for which one is the primary, most authoritative source.
Anchor text and placement matter more than volume
Descriptive anchor text ("technical SEO audit checklist" linking to that guide) tells both a crawler and a reader what the destination page is about; generic anchors like "click here" or "read more" waste the single strongest topical signal a link carries.
Links placed within the actual body content, near relevant context, carry more weight than links dumped in a footer or a generic "related posts" widget — placement is a proxy for relevance.
A practical structure to build toward
Aim for a hub-and-spoke pattern: a small number of comprehensive "hub" pages on core topics, each linking out to and receiving links from the more specific "spoke" pages underneath it — this keeps every page a few clicks from the homepage and makes the topical relationships explicit.
Audit for orphan pages (no internal links pointing to them at all) periodically — they're invisible to crawlers that discover content by following links, no matter how good the content itself is.