Why don't search engines recognise links from category pages?

[Gemini23]

To expand the title question - How does Google (or other search engines) detect a link is on a category (archive) page and not count it as an internal link? (Assuming they don't).

ie.. Why don't lists of posts on a category page not count as an internal link?

[Juniya]

Search engines do recognize and count links from category pages as internal links, but the value of these links is lower because a category page is just that, a category page. It's a landing page and google and other search engines know this and have known this. Their search engines are smart enough to detect the differences and they know that most sites use CMS's like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc and they all have an architecture where a category page links to other posts.

They do count as internal links but they(category pages) are not given the same treatment as an internal page because of various factors, one of them being user engagement for example, like I said, category pages are usually landing pages that lead you to other pages.

Some years back category pages were actually prefered by the likes of Google etc and then they changed the game and started to rank pages/posts more but that's a story for another day.