Broken Links

Paid plans

Overview

The broken-link crawler walks your website, follows every link it finds, and reports the ones that do not work. It runs on demand rather than on a schedule.

Broken links are invisible to uptime monitoring — your site is up, the page returns 200, and a link three levels down has been pointing at a deleted page for six months. This is how you find them.

INFO

Broken-link crawls are available on paid plans. On the free plan the action prompts you to upgrade. See Plans & Limits.

Running a crawl

1. Open the site monitor and go to its Broken Links tab.
2. Click Request Crawl and confirm.
3. The crawl is queued. You can leave the page.
4. You receive an email when it finishes.

Crawl duration depends on how large your site is — anywhere from under a minute for a small site to considerably longer for a large one.

While it runs, the crawl status shows as Requested and then In Progress.

Reading the results

Column	Meaning
Status Code	What the broken link returned. Red for 4xx, amber for 3xx.
URL	The link that is broken
Found On	The page containing the link — this is the page you need to edit
Link Text	The anchor text, so you can find it in the source

Found On is the column that matters. The broken URL tells you what is wrong; Found On tells you where to fix it.

Common status codes

Code	Meaning	What to do
404	Not found	Fix or remove the link
403	Forbidden	Often a site blocking crawlers — verify by hand before changing anything
410	Gone	Deliberately removed. Remove the link.
500	Server error	The target is broken, not your link. Recheck later.
301 / 302	Redirect	Not broken, but updating to the final URL is faster for users

TIP

Not every reported link is genuinely broken. Sites that rate-limit or block automated traffic commonly return 403 or 429 to a crawler while working perfectly in a browser. Check those by hand before editing anything.

Exporting

The results table has an export action that produces a spreadsheet — useful for handing a list to whoever maintains the content, or for tracking progress across a large cleanup.

Limitations

• On demand only. There is no scheduled crawl; you request each one.
• Rendered HTML. Links generated by client-side JavaScript after page load may not be discovered.
• Links behind authentication cannot be crawled — the crawler is anonymous.
• Only links on the site being monitored are crawled. It follows links off-site to check whether they work, but does not crawl into other sites.

Best Practices

• Crawl after a content migration. That is when links break in bulk.
• Fix 404s on your own domain first. They are entirely within your control and they affect both users and search ranking.
• Re-crawl to confirm. The report is a snapshot; run it again after fixing.
• Verify 403s manually before deleting a link that works fine for humans.