Somewhere on your site a link leads nowhere, and visitors are hitting it before you do. Enter your address and this checks up to 100 pages for dead links, 404s and missing images — then tells you which page each broken one sits on and what it was linked as, so you can go and fix it. No sign-up, nothing to install.
Every link is actually visited, not guessed at. Pages that have been deleted, sites whose servers are failing, and domains that no longer exist at all — a link to any of them looks perfectly healthy until someone clicks it.
Broken links to your own pages are the urgent ones. Links to other people's sites that have since died are worth fixing in a batch. The report keeps them apart so you know where to start.
Every broken link comes with the pages it appears on and the anchor text used, so you can find it in your CMS without searching the whole site.
Images that no longer load are checked too, and reported with the page they are on. It is the failure readers notice fastest and site owners spot last.
A link that quietly sends people somewhere else still works, so it is listed on its own rather than counted as broken. A redirect that ends in a dead page is called broken, because it is.
One row per source page, so the file is a work list. Opens in Excel, Sheets or Numbers and hands straight to whoever is doing the fixing.
A domain, a single page or an XML sitemap. example.com is enough — the scanner finds robots.txt and the sitemap on its own.
Up to 100 pages are read, every link and image on them is collected, and each destination is visited once to see whether it still works.
Broken links are grouped by destination with the pages they sit on. Download the CSV and work down it, or filter to internal-only and start there.
Most free link checkers give you one pile called “broken” and leave you to work out which ones really need fixing. These are the five answers you get here.
/page#section is checked as far as the page. Whether that particular section still exists on it is not tested.A broken link is a link that no longer reaches a working page. Clicking it returns an error instead of content, usually a 404 because the page was deleted or its URL changed, or a server error, or nothing at all because the domain has expired. Links break on their own over time as other sites reorganise, which is why a page that was fine last year may not be now. Images and scripts break the same way.
Broken internal links do hurt, because they waste crawl budget, break the flow of link value through your site and leave visitors at dead ends. Broken outbound links are a smaller issue on their own, but a page full of them signals neglect and looks like low-quality content to both readers and search engines. There is no specific penalty for a single dead link. The damage is cumulative and mostly shows up as worse user experience and weaker internal linking.
A 404 is the HTTP status code a server returns when the page you asked for does not exist. It usually means the page was deleted, moved without a redirect, or the URL was typed or linked wrongly. A 404 is a normal and correct response for a URL that genuinely has no content. The problem is not the code itself but pages on your site still linking to it.
Crawl the site and check the status code of every link it contains. A link checker follows your internal links page by page, requests each destination and reports anything returning a 4xx or 5xx code or failing to resolve. Google Search Console will also show 404s it has encountered, though only for URLs it already knows about. Doing it yourself catches links that were never crawled and gives you the source page and anchor text for each one.
Redirect or replace them. If the page moved, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so links and rankings carry over. If it is gone for good, point the link at the closest relevant page, or remove it if nothing fits. For broken links to other people's sites, find the current URL, swap in a different source, or delete the link.
Link rot is the gradual decay of links across the web as pages are deleted, moved or their domains lapse. Studies of long-lived web content have found a substantial share of links stop working within a decade, with news and academic citations hit particularly hard. Nothing you do to your own site prevents it, since the failures happen at the other end. The only answer is checking outbound links periodically.
A 404 means the page is not found and might come back, while a 410 means it was deliberately removed and is not coming back. Search engines treat 410 as a stronger signal and typically drop the URL from the index faster. Use 410 when you have permanently retired content with no replacement, and a 301 redirect when there is a suitable page to send people to.
Monthly is enough for most sites, and quarterly is fine for a small site that rarely changes. Check after any migration, redesign or bulk content change, because those are when internal links break in numbers. Large sites and anything with lots of outbound references benefit from a scheduled crawl, since external links break without warning.
The same crawl that finds dead links can tell you about missing canonicals, duplicate titles, noindex tags left on by accident and whether AI crawlers can read your site. That is the free SEO audit tool — same engine, sixty-three checks.
Both are pieces of Meelu, a desktop app where an AI marketing agent runs your marketing on your own machine — no page cap, no rate limit, and nothing leaves the laptop. Join the waitlist.