SEO Audit Hub

Broken link checker

Find every link on your site that leads to an error — and the pages that contain it — with one crawl.

  • No sign-up to start
  • 138 checks
  • 500 pages free

Broken link checker: what’s checked

Broken links waste the authority your pages pass along, send visitors to dead ends, and spend crawl budget on URLs that return errors. On a large site they accumulate quietly: a product is removed, a post is renamed, an external site goes away.

This checker crawls your site, collects every internal and external link, and checks where each one actually lands. For each broken target you see the status it returned and every page that links to it, so you can fix the link at the source instead of hunting for it.

9 Links Links pass authority and are how crawlers travel your site. These checks find links that lead nowhere, pages nothing links to, and anchors that say nothing about their destination.

  • Broken links

    Links that return an error frustrate visitors and waste search engines’ crawl budget. Fix the target URL, redirect it, or remove the link.

  • Broken or redirecting links to other sites

    Links to other sites rot without anything on your server changing — the other end moved or shut down. Dead outbound links are one of the clearest signals to a reader that a page is no longer maintained. Update or remove them.

  • Generic anchor text

    Generic anchors like “click here” tell search engines nothing about the target. Use descriptive, keyword-relevant link text.

  • Links search engines can’t follow

    Google follows only <a> elements with a real URL in href. Links built from click handlers or javascript: URLs pass no authority and may hide pages from the crawl. Use a normal href, and keep JavaScript for enhancement.

    Measured on your homepage with Google PageSpeed Insights.

  • Orphan page (no internal links)

    Orphan pages with no internal links are hard to discover and rank poorly. Link to them from relevant pages.

  • Pages returning a server error (5xx)

    A server error means the page exists but the server failed to build it, so visitors and search engines get nothing. Check the server or application logs for these URLs — a plugin, database or hosting problem is the usual cause.

  • Pages that didn’t respond (timeout or connection failure)

    These pages didn’t answer our requests, even when asked again slowly, so we couldn’t check them. Open them in a browser: if they load, the server is probably slow or limiting automated requests, which can slow search engine crawling too; if they don’t, check hosting, firewall and DNS.

  • Pages with only one inbound link

    Internal links are how importance flows around a site, and a page hanging off one link gets the least of it — and becomes unreachable if that link is ever removed. Add a link from another relevant page where it makes sense.

  • Sitemap pages nothing links to

    These pages are in your sitemap, so you are asking Google to index them, but nothing on the site links to them — visitors can only reach them by knowing the address. Link them from a relevant page, or drop them from the sitemap if they are not meant to be found.

How it works

  1. 1

    Enter your URL

    Paste your homepage. No account, no install, no verification.

  2. 2

    We crawl your site

    The crawler follows your internal links and runs every check against each page it reaches.

  3. 3

    Get your results

    See your score and issue counts at once. A free account shows every finding, page by page, with how to fix it.

Frequently asked questions

Does it check external links too?

Yes. Internal links are checked as part of the crawl; outbound links to other sites are checked with a lightweight request each, so a dead reference on your blog shows up alongside your own 404s.

Will it tell me where each broken link is?

Yes — every broken target lists the pages that link to it. With a free account you can also export the full list as a CSV.

What else does it find besides 404s?

Pages that time out or return server errors, pages nothing links to, pages with only one link pointing at them, and links with generic anchor text like “click here”.

Related free tools

Redirect checker → Follow every redirect on your site to where it really ends — and find the chains and dead ends along the way. Website SEO audit → Crawl your whole site and get a health score, every issue ranked by impact, and a report you can act on — in minutes. Image SEO checker → Find the images on your site that are missing alt text, too heavy, or slowing your pages down.

Ready to check your site?

It takes a couple of minutes and costs nothing.