{
  "schemaVersion": "crawler-atlas-1",
  "atlasVersion": "atlas-2026-07-28-v1",
  "canonical": "/atlas/internal-links",
  "title": "Internal link discovery",
  "category": {
    "slug": "discovery",
    "title": "Discovery and crawl frontiers"
  },
  "definition": "Ordinary HTML links are the most portable discovery mechanism because they are visible without executing JavaScript.",
  "mechanism": "A crawler parses anchor destinations, normalizes them, applies policy, and adds unseen URLs to its frontier. Anchor placement and graph connectivity affect how soon a page is encountered.",
  "validation": "Compare the raw response HTML with the rendered DOM and record the exact source page and discovery mechanism for every new URL.",
  "commonFailure": "Buttons, click handlers, and script-generated routes can look like navigation to a person while providing no crawlable URL in the server response.",
  "related": [
    "/atlas/url-normalization",
    "/atlas/orphan-pages"
  ],
  "modified": "2026-07-28"
}