HrefHawk scans your published content, finds phrases that connect one post to another, and suggests internal links you can accept or reject from the editor sidebar. No external APIs. No third-party dependencies. Everything runs inside your WordPress installation.
The Lexical engine reads every post through a seven-stage cleaning pipeline, extracts phrases at configurable depth, and scores each phrase-to-post relationship using five signals: term uniqueness across your corpus, phrase length, structural context (headings and first paragraphs), title matching, and category matching. Suggestions are ranked by composite score and presented in the post editor where you accept, reject, or revoke each one with a single click.
The scan runs on a burst-aware pipeline that calibrates to your server’s timeout limits. Sites with thousands of posts complete without hitting PHP timeouts. Auto-rescan fires after each post save to keep the phrase index current.
HrefHawk is available on the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Features
Lexical scanning with seven-stage content cleaning. Phrase extraction at 1 to 5 word depth. Five weighted scoring signals. Editor sidebar panel with accept, reject, and revoke workflow. Burst-aware background processing with server calibration. Auto-rescan on post save. Daily orphan cleanup and weekly table optimisation. Debug logging with daily rotation. English stop words list included.
Requirements
WordPress 6.0 or higher. PHP 7.4 or higher.