# Broken Link Checker

> A broken link checker crawls a page, requests every link it finds and reports the ones that answer 404, 500 or nothing at all. Paste a URL and you get each dead link with its status code, its anchor text and whether it points at your own site or somebody else's.

Source: https://rankcert.com/tools/broken-link-checker
Free, no signup. Updated: 2026-09-08

## How to use it

1. Paste the page you want crawled - a homepage, a blog index or a single post.
2. We fetch it once, pull out every link, and request each one the way a crawler would.
3. Fix the internal 404s first, then repoint or drop the dead external links.

## Questions

### Do broken links hurt SEO?

Broken internal links do. Every one is link equity poured into a dead end and crawl budget spent on nothing. Broken external links do not carry a direct penalty, but a page full of rotted citations reads as unmaintained to both readers and quality raters.

### How many links does this check?

The first 50 links on the page. That covers almost every article and most navigation-heavy pages, and it keeps the scan under the timeout instead of hanging for a minute.

### Does it crawl my whole site?

No - it crawls one page at a time. Run it on your sitemap's busiest pages, or on your blog index to sweep every post link at once.

### Why does a link show as dead when it opens fine in my browser?

Some sites block unknown user agents or answer HEAD requests with an error. We retry with a normal GET when a server rejects HEAD, but a hard bot block still reads as dead. Open anything surprising by hand before deleting it.

### What is the difference between a broken link and a redirect?

A redirect still resolves - it just costs a hop. A broken link answers 4xx or 5xx and resolves to nothing. Use the redirect checker for chains and this for dead ends.

### Should I fix or delete a dead external link?

Look it up in the Wayback Machine first. If the page still exists somewhere, repoint it. If the source is gone for good, remove the link and keep the sentence.

### How often should I run a broken link audit?

Quarterly for a small site, monthly if you publish weekly. External link rot runs at roughly 5% a year, so an old post quietly accumulates dead citations without you touching it.

### Why are http links flagged?

They are not broken, but they force a downgrade and an extra redirect hop on every click. Updating them to https is a one-line fix that removes a hop from the chain.

## Related tools

- [Backlink Verifier](https://rankcert.com/tools/backlink-verifier): Check whether a page really links to your domain, what rel attribute the link carries, and whether the page is indexable at all.
- [Outbound Link Checker](https://rankcert.com/tools/outbound-link-checker): List every external link on a page with its rel attribute, count how many pass equity, and catch affiliate links that should be marked sponsored.
- [robots.txt Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/robots-txt-generator): Build a valid robots.txt with your disallow rules, sitemap reference and optional AI crawler blocks, ready to paste at the root of your site.
- [llms.txt Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/llms-txt-generator): Generate an llms.txt file that tells AI answer engines what your product is and which pages matter, in the markdown format the proposal specifies.
- [Schema Markup Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/schema-markup-generator): Generate valid JSON-LD for Organization, SoftwareApplication, Article and BreadcrumbList, ready to paste into your page head.
- [FAQ Schema Generator](https://rankcert.com/tools/faq-schema-generator): Turn a list of questions and answers into valid FAQPage JSON-LD, the structured data AI answer engines quote most readily.