Yes, linking a new page from an established, regularly crawled, authoritative page reliably speeds discovery and often indexing, and it is one of the most dependable levers you have. The mechanism is straightforward: Google revisits trusted, frequently updated pages often, so a link placed on one of those pages gives a crawler a fast, trusted path to the new URL. Instead of waiting for the new page to be found through a slow or shallow route, you put it directly in the crawler’s regular path.
What makes this work is the combination of two qualities in the source page. The page has to be one Google already trusts and crawls often, because a link from a page that is itself rarely visited does little to accelerate anything. When both conditions hold, the new page is discovered sooner, and a page that is discovered sooner generally gets evaluated and indexed sooner. This is observed behavior worth treating as a strong tendency rather than a guarantee, and it is distinct from a few common misreads.
Two errors to avoid frame why the nuance matters. One is the claim that internal links do not affect indexing at all, which ignores that discovery is the first gate to indexing and links are how discovery happens. The other is conflating faster indexing with better ranking. A trusted link gets the page found and assessed faster, but whether the page then ranks depends on its content, relevance, and competition. Speeding discovery is real and valuable, but it does not buy a position in the results.
To use this deliberately, identify the handful of pages on your site that Google crawls most often, usually your homepage, a strong pillar page, or a high-traffic post, and add a genuine contextual link from one of them to each new page you want indexed quickly. Make the link relevant rather than forced, place it in the body where it fits the topic, and you have handed the crawler a trusted route to the page on its next regular pass.