Broken Link Checker
Crawl your site for broken links.
Crawl a site and surface every broken internal and external link so you can fix them before users hit them.
What you get
Everything Broken Link Checker delivers, out of the box.
Full-site link crawl
Internal & external
Source-page mapping
Free to run
How it works
From input to insight in three steps.
Enter your URL or keyword
Point Broken Link Checker at any page, domain or search term, yours or a competitor's.
SEO Roger analyzes it
We run the analysis with our crawler and validators in seconds.
Get a prioritized report
Read a clear, ranked breakdown of exactly what to do next.
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What is Broken Link Checker?
The Broken Link Checker crawls your site and reports every internal and external link that no longer resolves, along with the page each broken link sits on so you can go straight to the fix. It is free on every plan.
How to use Broken Link Checker
From signup to shipped fix, this is the whole loop.
- 1Create a free accountSign up in under a minute. No credit card is required, and your first site scan works without an account at all.
- 2Point Broken Link Checker at your siteEnter the URL or domain you want to analyze. You can run it on your own site or on a competitor's.
- 3Let it pull the live dataBroken Link Checker fetches the current state of the page or domain and runs its checks. Most runs finish in seconds.
- 4Read the ranked findingsResults come back ordered by impact rather than by count, so the issue costing you the most traffic is at the top, not buried under cosmetic warnings.
- 5Ship the fix, then re-runApply the recommended change, or let Roger AI draft it for you, then run the tool again to confirm the issue is resolved and track the improvement.
Why Broken Link Checker matters
Broken links accumulate on every site that publishes for long enough, because the web moves underneath you. Internal ones are your own errors from moved or deleted pages. External ones happen when a site you cited reorganizes or disappears, which you have no way of knowing without checking. Both waste crawl budget, and both signal neglect to readers who hit them.
Search is no longer only Google. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude answer a growing share of queries by reading the same pages crawlers do, then citing a handful of sources. SEO Roger keeps both audiences in view: the classic SERP and the AI answer, from one workspace.
Who it's for
- In-house SEOs who need crawling, indexing and structured data without stitching three tools together
- Agencies and consultants producing client-ready findings, fast
- Founders and marketers who want the fix, not just the metric
Broken Link Checker in depth
Internal and external breaks are different problems
A broken internal link is entirely your fault and entirely within your control, and it is worse than it looks because it strands whatever the link was pointing at and interrupts the flow of authority through your site. A broken external link is not your fault, and is mostly a credibility and user experience problem: a reference that goes nowhere undermines the claim it was supporting.
Fix at the source, not one by one
Broken links cluster. One deleted page linked from forty articles produces forty findings with a single cause, and fixing them individually is forty times the necessary work. Sort by destination rather than by source page: the fix is usually one redirect from the old URL to its replacement, which repairs every occurrence at once.
Broken links that had inbound value
The highest-value findings are pages that other sites link to and that no longer resolve. Every one of those is inbound authority being discarded at your door. Redirecting them to the closest genuine equivalent recovers most of that value and is among the cheapest wins in technical SEO, which is why running this alongside a backlink audit is worthwhile.
Not every broken link deserves the same response
A dead external link in a five-year-old post read by nobody does not need the same attention as a dead link in your main navigation. Fix navigation, top pages and anything with inbound links first. For old external references, updating to an archived copy or simply removing the link is usually the proportionate response.
Broken Link Checker questions, answered
Does it cost credits?
No. The Broken Link Checker is free on every plan, because it runs on our own crawler rather than a paid data provider.
How many pages will it crawl?
Crawl depth follows your plan, since depth is where the infrastructure cost sits: 50 pages on Free, 500 on Starter, 2,000 on Pro and 10,000 on Agency. A run is clamped to your ceiling rather than failing, so you always get complete results for the pages reached.
Do broken links directly hurt rankings?
There is no direct penalty for having them. The damage is indirect and real: wasted crawl budget, interrupted internal link flow, orphaned pages, and users hitting dead ends. On a large site the crawl budget effect is the one that matters most.
A link reports as broken but works when I click it. Why?
Common causes are a site blocking automated requests, rate limiting after several checks, a slow server timing out, or a page that requires a session. External links are more prone to this than internal ones. Spot-check anything surprising before deleting it.
Should I remove or redirect a broken link?
If you control the destination, redirect the old URL to its replacement, which fixes every link pointing at it simultaneously. If the destination belongs to someone else and is gone for good, update the link to a current equivalent or remove it. Redirecting to an unrelated page is worse than leaving a 404.
How often should I check?
Quarterly for a stable site, and immediately after any migration, restructure or bulk deletion, which are the events that create broken links in volume.
Ready to try Broken Link Checker?
Create a free account and run it in minutes, plus 55+ other SEO and AI-visibility tools in the same workspace.