Broken Link Checker — find dead links and 404s on any page

What counts as a broken link

A broken link points somewhere that no longer answers with a page: a 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, a 5xx server error, a domain that no longer resolves (expired, sold or mistyped), a server that refuses the connection, or a redirect loop that never arrives anywhere. Every one of them is a dead end for a visitor. For search engines they are wasted crawl budget and lost link equity, and on your own site they are a sign of neglect that both people and quality raters notice. Links rot steadily — other sites restructure, products are discontinued, a CMS migration changes every URL — so a site that was clean last year rarely still is.

How this checker works

• It reads the page like a crawler. The page is fetched through Monity's relay and parsed in your browser: every <a href>, and optionally every image, script, stylesheet, icon, video and embed.
• It records where each link sits. Anchor text (or alt text), and whether the link is in the navigation, header, footer, sidebar or main content — what you need to find it again in your CMS.
• It can go a level deeper. With crawling on, it opens up to five internal pages — navigation and main-content links first — and checks their links too, up to 250 unique links per run.
• Every link is checked live. A HEAD request first, a small ranged GET for servers that refuse HEAD, and redirects followed one hop at a time so you see the full chain.

Broken, redirect, unverifiable: what the verdicts mean

Broken

The destination is gone or failing: 404 and 410, server errors, dead domains, refused connections and redirect loops. On your own site, a 401 or 403 also counts — visitors are refused too, unless the page sits behind a login. Fix internal broken links by pointing them at the right page (or redirecting the old URL), and update or remove external ones.

Redirect

The link works, but only after one or more hops. The checker says what changed — HTTP to HTTPS, a trailing slash, www, or a different page — and whether the redirect is permanent (301, 308) or temporary (302, 307). Internal links should point straight at the final URL: each hop costs a round trip and some crawl budget, and long chains are where links eventually break. To trace one chain in detail — every hop, as different crawlers see it — use the redirect checker.

Unverifiable

The server answered, but not in a way that proves anything. LinkedIn returns 999 to every robot; X and many Cloudflare-protected sites answer with a 403 bot check; busy sites rate-limit with 429; and a timeout or certificate error seen from a server can be temporary. These links usually work for people, so the checker lists them separately, with the reason, instead of crying "broken" — a list full of false alarms is a list nobody acts on.

Soft 404s and missing anchors

Two kinds of broken link never show up as an error code. A soft 404 is a page that answers 200 OK but says "page not found" — Google treats it as an error, while status-code checkers call it fine. When the checker crawls a page whose title or main heading says it can't be found, it flags it. And in-page links like #pricing break silently when someone renames a heading: the checker looks for the target id on the page and lists every anchor that points at nothing.

Fixing broken links, fastest first

1. Navigation and footer links. They appear on every page, so one fix removes hundreds of broken links at once.
2. Links in the main content of your top pages. They're the ones readers actually click.
3. External links to dead domains. Expired domains get bought and filled with spam or malware — a link to one is a risk, not just a dead end.
4. Images, scripts and stylesheets that 404. They break layouts and features without any visible error message.
5. Internal redirects. Update links to the final URL so visitors and crawlers skip the hops.

Download the CSV to work through the list: there's one row per link per page it appears on, with the status, the reason, the redirect chain, the anchor text and the page section.

Stay ahead of link rot

A one-off check is out of date the day another site moves a page. Monity rechecks your pages on a schedule, from a real browser — so links added by JavaScript are covered and bot walls aren't mistaken for dead pages — and alerts you in Slack, Teams or email when a link breaks. Only links that are newly broken trigger an alert, never the same dead footer link every hour. While you're here, run the free SEO & AI visibility audit for the rest of the page's technical health, or the meta tag checker to see how it appears in Google.