Internal link architecture audit checklist for hub-and-leaf sites
What this page covers
Internal link architecture audit checklist for hub-and-leaf sites
Use this checklist to review whether hub pages, leaf pages, and supporting links help users and crawlers move through your site with a clear purpose.
The goal is to find weak entry points, orphaned leaves, thin hub coverage, and link patterns that block discovery before you expand the site further.
In brief
- Every important leaf should link back to its parent hub and to closely related pages when the connection is useful.
- Every hub should expose its strongest leaves clearly, without hiding them behind filters, scripts, or deep click paths.
- The audit should check crawlability, anchor clarity, link depth, sitemap alignment, and whether internal links match real search intent.
What to do
Start with the site graph. Identify the main hubs, their leaf pages, and any pages that receive little or no internal support. A healthy hub-and-leaf structure should make the topic map easy to understand from the home page, the hub page, and the XML sitemap.
Then review the links themselves. Check whether hub pages link to priority leaves, whether leaves link back to the right hub, and whether related leaves support each other without creating random cross-links. Anchor text should describe the destination page naturally.
Finally, compare the architecture with search demand. If a hub has many leaves but no clear buying or research path, the structure may look large but still perform poorly. If important intents have no leaf page, the internal linking issue is really a coverage gap.
What to keep in mind
This checklist is useful for SaaS sites, marketplaces, directories, franchise networks, multi-location businesses, agencies, and other US teams building topic clusters or programmatic SEO sections.
It is not a replacement for content quality, technical SEO, or demand validation. Strong internal links cannot rescue pages that answer the wrong question, duplicate each other, or are blocked from being crawled.
Radar can help by scanning the public website structure, visualizing hubs and leaves, and highlighting weak spots such as missing links, poor discovery paths, sitemap issues, and pages that need attention first.