Free Broken Link Checker

A broken link checker requests a URL and reports whether it still works. A link is "broken" when the destination answers with an error such as 404 (not found), 410 (gone) or 500 (server error), when the domain no longer resolves, or when the request times out. This free online broken link checker does that for a list of up to 100 URLs at a time, and it also flags links that redirect (301, 302, 307, 308) and shows where they point, so you can decide whether to update them to the final destination.

For each URL you get the HTTP status code and status text, a healthy / redirect / broken / check-manually verdict and, for redirects, the target location. Results can be filtered by status and exported as CSV so you can hand a fix list to a developer or work through it yourself.

1. Collect the links you want to test (from your sitemap, a CMS export or a Search Console report, or by crawling your site with the sitemap generator) and paste them into the box above, one URL per line.
2. Start the scan. Each link is requested in turn and its HTTP status appears as it comes back.
3. Filter the results to errors only to see just the broken links, dead links and timeouts.
4. Open each failing URL to confirm it, then fix or remove the link in your page.
5. Export the report as CSV if you need to share the list, and re-run the check when the fixes are live.

People call this tool different things depending on what they are hunting for. A 404 checker looks for pages that return "404 Not Found"; a dead link checker looks for links whose destination no longer exists at all; a broken link finder or link analyzer covers both plus server errors and timeouts. They are the same test, and this checker reports all of those cases in one pass.

Google has said many times that a few 404s will not tank a site, and that is true. The damage from broken links is indirect but real:

• Wasted link equity. Internal links pass PageRank. A link to a page that no longer exists passes it into a dead end, and every backlink from other sites that points at a 404 on your domain is authority you earned and then threw away.
• Crawl budget. Googlebot follows your internal links. The more of them lead to errors, the more crawl time goes to pages that will never be indexed instead of the pages you want ranked.
• User signals. Visitors who hit a dead page leave. Higher bounce and shorter sessions are the behavioural signals a search engine sees when a site is poorly maintained.
• Trust. Pages that cite dead sources look abandoned to both readers and quality raters.

The fix depends on where the link points and why it broke:

Fix internal broken links first. They are entirely under your control, they affect crawling and internal PageRank flow, and they are usually the result of a migration or a rename that can be resolved with a handful of redirects. Then move to external links on your most-visited and most-linked pages, because those are the pages Google evaluates most closely. Links in old blog posts that nobody reads can wait.

You supply the URLs; the checker requests each one from our server with a lightweight HEAD request (falling back to GET when a site does not answer HEAD), waits up to ten seconds, and returns the status code without following redirects, so you see the first response exactly as a crawler would. There is no signup. Because the requests come from a server rather than a normal browser, a few sites that block automated traffic may answer 403 even though the page works for visitors. When a result looks wrong, open the URL in a new tab to confirm before fixing it.

The tool checks the URLs you give it; it does not crawl a site and discover links on its own. That makes it a good fit for verifying the links in a new post before publishing, re-testing URLs that Search Console flagged, validating a redirect map after a migration, or checking every URL in a sitemap. For a whole-site crawl of thousands of pages, use a desktop crawler to collect the links and paste the suspicious ones in here to verify them.

Run a check on any page right after you publish it, after every migration or redesign, and on your top pages roughly once a month. Also check the pages that Search Console lists under "Not found (404)" in the Pages report: paste them in here to see which are still broken and which have since been fixed or redirected. Pair it with the XML sitemap generator so the URLs you submit to Google are only the ones that actually resolve.