---
title: "Anchor indexing"
slug: "anchor-indexing"
abstract: "Explains how anchor indexing finds documents linked from crawled pages and indexes them as individual items."
---
# Anchor indexing

> [!important]
> Feature availability is part of a phased rollout. Your organization may not see this functionality yet. It will become available when your environment is included in the rollout.

Site sources discover webpages through sitemaps and starting URLs, then crawl them. Anchor indexing checks links on crawled pages and indexes documents as separate items. You can use anchor indexing to make linked resources, such as PDFs, appear in search results independently of the webpages that link to them. When you create a source, you configure rules to choose which pages SitecoreAI checks for links and which links it indexes as documents.

> [!note]
> SitecoreAI also indexes documents independently when their URLs are included in the sitemap being crawled.

## Choose which documents to index

When you create a site source, you configure page and link rules that control how documents are discovered and indexed:

- **Page rules** - determine which crawled pages SitecoreAI checks for links. If you don't configure page rules, SitecoreAI checks all crawled pages.
- **Link rules** - determine which linked documents SitecoreAI indexes.

Use conditions to limit indexing to relevant documents, such as PDFs, instead of indexing every linked document.

## Document metadata

After SitecoreAI indexes a document, you can map its text and link attributes to [fields in the index](https://doc.sitecore.com/sai/en/users/sitecoreai/design-components/search-experiences/understanding-search-sources/fields.html "Fields").

For indexed PDFs, you can also map embedded PDF metadata to fields. For example, ``Title``.

Before you publish the site source, use **Test extraction** on a page to check which links match your rules and review the field values SitecoreAI will index.