Broken link checker for a page
Paste the address of a page. The tool follows every link on it, reports the ones that no longer respond, and reads the tags Google looks at along the way. The report appears on this page.
Checking…
What the tool checks
One request to the page you give it, then one request to each of its links.
The links on the page
Status of every link, internal and external. Dead links are kept apart from redirects, server errors and inconclusive answers, because those four cases are fixed in different ways.
The tags Google reads
Title tag and its length, meta description, number of H1 headings, canonical URL, meta robots tag. Each deviation comes with the step that fixes it.
Images and structured data
Images with no alt attribute, with a sample of the files involved. JSON-LD blocks found, types declared, and a flag on any block holding invalid JSON, which Google ignores entirely.
The limits, before you start
The tool checks one page, the one you give it, and stops at 40 links so a check does not turn into a full crawl. mailto:, tel: and in-page anchors are skipped. A link answering 403 appears separately: a site protected against robots often answers 403 to a tool and 200 to a browser, so reporting it as dead would be wrong. For a whole site you need a crawler, described below.
Beyond a single page
The page you have open
The same check without leaving the page, including behind a password or on a staging site, where an online tool cannot reach.
- Broken links highlighted inside the page
- Button to jump to the faulty link
- Internal, external and nofollow filters
- Everything stays in the browser
A whole website
The crawler walks every page and reports each dead link together with the page that holds it. A page-by-page check cannot do that.
- Broken internal and external links
- 4XX and 5XX statuses, pages with no answer
- Redirects, chains and loops
- Source page of every faulty link
Broken link, dead link, link rot: one problem
Three names for the same thing. All of them describe a link whose destination no longer answers.
What the visitor sees
They click and land on an error page, or on a blank screen when the remote server answers nothing at all. The word changes from one tool to the next, the symptom stays the same.
What the server sees
Status 404 when the page is gone, 410 for a deliberate removal, 5XX when the remote server is failing, no answer at all when the domain has disappeared.
What a broken link actually costs
The visitor stops
They hit an error page mid-journey. On a product page or inside a checkout flow, that is a lost sale.
Crawling is wasted
Google spends its crawl budget on dead URLs instead of discovering your useful pages.
Internal linking breaks
A broken internal link cuts the flow of authority to the page it was meant to support. See the internal linking suggested by AI in SEO Cartograph.
The site looks neglected
Dead links on a shop or a content site weigh on trust.
What order to fix them in
Collect
A single page with the form above, the whole site with the crawler. For each dead link, note its status and the page that holds it.
Prioritise
Start with broken internal links and with the pages that bring traffic or conversions. A dead external link on a rarely visited page can wait.
Fix according to the case
The page has moved: update the link and put a 301 redirect on the old URL. The resource is gone: remove the link or point it at the closest equivalent. Do not redirect everything to the home page, that counts as a soft 404.
Check again
Run the check again after the fix. On a living site, a regular pass keeps dead external links from piling up.
Two situations that break links quietly
A multilingual site multiplies the chances of breaking a link. Every page exists in two, three or four versions, and a link written once for the English version often stays untouched in the others. The destination page moves later on one version only, and the link dies in the remaining languages without anyone noticing. Check each language version on its own, not only the one you look at every day.
The second case is outbound links to institutions, associations and public bodies. Those sites reorganise their structures on their own schedule, and the pages you quoted in an article or a guide change address with no redirect. Those links do not break through anything you did, but they break on your pages.
The particular case of links to PDF files
Many sites point to forms, price lists or terms as PDF files. Those files get renamed at every yearly update, and the old link falls to 404. The tool follows those links like any other and returns their status, but it does not read the content of the file.