Free tool · No signup
Broken link checker
Dead links waste crawl budget, break the flow of authority through your site, and make a business look neglected. Enter a URL and we will crawl it for you.
URL, and how many pages to crawl. Maximum 50.
Why it matters
What broken links actually cost
Dead links do not only annoy visitors. They work against the site in four separate ways at once.
- Wasted link equityEvery broken internal link is a dead end for the authority flowing through your site. That is ranking power you already earned and are not using.
- Visitors who leaveSomeone who hits a 404 goes back to Google. If they arrived from a search, that return journey tells search engines the result did not deliver.
- Crawl budget spent on nothingGoogle allocates a finite amount of crawling to your site. Every dead link it follows is a page it could have indexed instead.
- Lost credibilityA site full of dead links looks abandoned. For a service business trading on reliability, that is a direct hit.
More detail in why dead links are bad for SEO.
The scale of it
More common than most site owners think
This is not a marketing claim. Every figure below is from published research, and you can check each one.
- Ahrefs, 202466.5% of links rotted over nine years. Around 74.5% were lost or problematic once errors are included.
- Pew Research, 202423% of news webpages and 21% of government pages contain at least one broken link.
- Wikipedia54% of reference pages contain at least one broken citation link.
- arXiv, 202435.2% of high-traffic homepages have at least one broken external link.
- Square Eye, 202587% of top law firm websites had broken links, averaging around 225 per site.
Blog, business site or government portal — link rot is everywhere, and almost nobody is checking. Which is also why fixing it is one of the cheapest wins available to a small site.
Next
Once the dead links are gone
- SEO Health Score CheckerThe wider technical picture, scored out of 100.
- Meta Title & Description CheckerWhether your listing earns the click in the first place.
- Word Counter & ReadabilityWhether the pages behind those links are worth landing on.
- All eight free toolsNo email, no signup, no trial.
Keeping links healthy is part of ongoing work rather than a one-off. See our SEO services or content and copywriting if you would rather it was someone else’s job.
This checks links. The audit checks everything.
Technical problems, content gaps, competitor context and a prioritised action plan — written by a person rather than generated by a tool.