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Free SEO Tool

Free Broken Link Checker

Find the broken links on any page, internal and external, with real 404s separated from login walls and rate limits. No sign-up required.

How to find broken links on a page

1. Enter a page URL

Any public page. The checker reads every link on it, internal and external alike.

2. Every destination gets checked

Each unique destination is requested and graded, up to 150 per scan, with duplicates checked once.

3. Fix what actually matters

Broken links first, then redirects. Login walls and rate limits are separated out so you do not chase links that work.

What each result means

Most checkers report anything that is not a 200 as broken. Three of these four groups are not.

ResultWhat it meansWhat to do
BrokenThe server returned 404, 410, 500 or similar. The link genuinely does not work.Fix or remove it. This is the only group that always needs action.
No responseNothing came back. The domain may no longer resolve, or the server timed out.Check the domain still exists. Dead domains are common in older posts.
RedirectThe link works but sends visitors somewhere else before landing.Update the link to point at the final destination. Low priority, but it saves a hop.
BlockedThe destination returned 401, 403 or 429 to an anonymous request.Usually nothing. These often work fine for real visitors and are flagged separately for that reason.

Why most broken link checkers cry wolf

Run any page with outbound links through a typical checker and it will report a handful of failures that are not failures. LinkedIn, news sites behind paywalls, Cloudflare-protected pages and anything with a bot filter routinely return 403 Forbidden to an automated request while working perfectly in a browser.

Reporting those as broken sends people editing links that were never wrong. A 429 is the same problem from the other direction: the destination is rate limiting the checker, which says nothing at all about the link.

This tool grades those as blocked rather than broken and keeps them out of the broken count. The number at the top is links you actually need to fix.

Do broken links hurt SEO?

Less than most guides claim, and the two cases are worth separating. A broken outbound link is a mild quality signal and mostly a user experience problem. Nobody is penalised for linking to a site that later shut down.

A broken internal link matters more. It wastes crawl budget on a URL that returns nothing, and it cuts the target page out of the internal link graph that moves authority around your site. A page nothing successfully links to is a page that struggles to rank.

Neither is a penalty. Both are cheap to fix, which is the real argument for doing it: this is one of the few SEO tasks where the work is unambiguous and the result is immediate.

Other free SEO tools

This tool answers whether links resolve. These answer the rest:

Frequently asked questions

How can I check if a link is broken?
Paste the page containing the link into the tool above and it requests every destination on that page, reporting the status each one returns. To check a single link by hand, open it in a private window, since your normal browser may serve a cached copy of a page that no longer exists.
How to identify a broken link?
A broken link returns a 4xx or 5xx status code, most often 404 for a page that no longer exists. What matters is separating those from links that merely look broken to an automated checker: a 403 usually means the destination refuses anonymous requests while working perfectly for real visitors. This tool grades those separately rather than lumping them together.
How to check broken links of a website?
This tool checks one page at a time, including every internal and external link on it. To cover a whole site you need a crawler that follows links between pages, such as Screaming Frog for a desktop scan or Ahrefs and Semrush for an ongoing audit. Start with your highest traffic pages, since a broken link there costs the most.
How can I check all links on a website?
Site-wide checking needs a crawler that walks your internal link graph, and most free tools including this one work page by page. A practical middle ground is to run your most important pages through a page-level checker, then use Google Search Console's Pages report, which flags 404s Googlebot has already found across the whole site.
How to check for dead links?
A dead link points at a domain or page that no longer exists at all, rather than one that has moved. The tool above reports these as no response, since nothing comes back from the request. They are most common in older articles where a cited source has shut down, which is why archived posts are worth periodically rechecking.
How can I fix a broken link?
There are three options in order of preference. Point the link at the correct current URL if the content moved. Point it at an equivalent source if the original is gone. Remove the link and keep the surrounding text if neither applies. For a broken link to a page on your own site, a 301 redirect from the old URL fixes every occurrence at once.
How to fix a broken website link?
For links on your own pages, edit the link and republish. For links pointing at your site from elsewhere, you cannot edit them, so add a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the right destination. That preserves the link value from those external references, which is the part worth keeping.
How to restore a dead link?
If the destination is genuinely gone, look it up in the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org, which often has a copy. You can either link to the archived version, noting that it is an archive, or find a current source covering the same ground. Linking to an archive is honest and preserves the citation.
How do I view a broken link?
Open it in a private or incognito window. Your normal browser may hold a cached copy of a page that no longer exists, which is a common source of confusion when one person sees a working page and another sees a 404. Developer tools will show the real status code in the network tab.
How can I check a link?
For whether a link resolves, use the tool above or open it in a private window. For whether a link is safe rather than working, this is not the right tool: use VirusTotal or a security vendor's link scanner, which check a URL against known phishing and malware databases. The two questions are different and need different tools.
How do I find my links?
To see the links on one of your pages, run it through the tool above, which lists every destination with its anchor text. To find links pointing at your site from elsewhere, that is backlink data rather than on-page data, and our backlink checker covers it.
Do broken links hurt SEO?
Less directly than most guides claim, and the honest answer separates two cases. Broken outbound links are a mild quality signal and mostly a user experience problem. Broken internal links matter more, because they waste crawl budget and cut pages off from the internal link graph that passes authority around your site. Neither is a penalty, but both are worth fixing.
How many links does this tool check?
Up to 150 unique destinations per page, with duplicates checked once, since one destination linked five times is still one destination. Each request has an eight second timeout and they run in batches so a page with many slow external hosts still completes. Pages with more than 150 destinations report how many were left unchecked.
What is the difference between this and the internal link checker?
Our internal link checker analyses the structure of your internal linking: anchor text quality, nofollow use, orphaned patterns, and a status check on a sample of internal destinations. This tool does one job instead, checking whether links actually resolve, and covers external destinations as well as internal ones at a much higher limit. Use the internal link checker for link strategy, this one for finding what is broken.
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