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A visitor clicks a link on your site and lands on a 404 error page. They leave and probably never come back. This Broken Links Finder scans your entire website and identifies every link that leads to a dead end. It is for site owners maintaining large websites, SEO professionals auditing site health, and anyone who wants to stop losing visitors and search engine trust to broken links.
Enter your domain, run the scan, and get a list of every broken internal and external link on your site along with the HTTP status codes and the pages where the dead links were found. Fix them and restore a smooth experience for both users and search engine crawlers.
A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a page that no longer exists, has moved without a redirect, or is otherwise unreachable. When a user clicks a broken link, they see an error page instead of the content they expected. Most users do not troubleshoot. They hit the back button and try the next search result. Every broken link is a potential lost visitor, a lost sale, or a lost subscriber.
Search engines also care about broken links. When a crawler follows a link and hits a dead end, it wastes crawl budget that could have been spent discovering and indexing your valuable content. A site with many broken links appears poorly maintained, which can erode the trust signals that contribute to rankings. The broken links finder automates what would otherwise be a manual and tedious process. Instead of clicking every link on your site to verify it works, you run a single scan and get a prioritized list of problems to fix.
The tool crawls your website starting from the URL you provide. It follows internal links to discover pages, then checks every link found on each page by sending an HTTP request and recording the response code. Links that return 400-level or 500-level status codes, or that time out without responding, are flagged as broken. The tool compiles these into a report showing the broken URL, the status code, and the source page where the broken link is located.
You run a recipe blog with three hundred posts accumulated over five years. Your traffic has been slowly declining and you are not sure why. You run the broken links finder on your entire site. The scan finds twenty-two broken external links pointing to food blogs that have shut down or moved, eight broken internal links pointing to recipe pages you deleted without setting redirects, and three links to images that no longer exist. You update the external links to point to active sources, add redirects for the deleted recipes, and fix the broken image links. Your site now has zero dead ends. The fix takes an afternoon, and your site health improves immediately for both users and search engines.
A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a page or resource that is no longer available. When clicked, it returns an error instead of the expected content. Common causes include deleted pages, moved content without a redirect, mistyped URLs, and external sites that have shut down or changed their URL structure.
Yes, indirectly. Broken links create a poor user experience, which can increase bounce rates. They also waste crawl budget, as search engines spend time following dead links instead of discovering your valuable pages. A site with many broken links may be seen as poorly maintained, which can erode trust signals over time.
An internal link points to another page on your own website. A broken internal link is one you can fix directly by updating the URL or restoring the missing page. An external link points to a page on a different website. A broken external link occurs when that other site deletes the page, moves it without a redirect, or goes offline entirely. You cannot fix external broken links directly, but you can update your link to point to an alternative source or remove it.
For most sites, a monthly check is sufficient. Sites that publish frequently, link to many external resources, or have large archives of older content may benefit from checking every two weeks. After a major site redesign or migration, run a full scan immediately to catch any links that broke during the transition.
First, check whether the content has moved to a new URL by searching for the page title or using the Wayback Machine. If the content still exists at a new address, update your link. If it is gone entirely, find a similar resource from a reputable source and link to that instead. If no suitable replacement exists, remove the link or replace it with a citation that does not require a hyperlink.
No. A few broken links will not trigger a penalty. Google understands that links break over time, especially external ones. However, a very large number of broken links across your site signals poor maintenance and can degrade the overall quality assessment of your site, which may indirectly affect rankings.
