Paste any page and every outbound link on it gets tested for real — 404s, dead domains and timeouts reported with their status codes. Perfect for cleaning up your own pages, or for finding broken-link-building opportunities on someone else's.
Try ,
A resource page, a competitor's roundup, or one of your own posts. We read the page and collect every link on it.
Each destination is requested individually and reported with its real status code — 404, 410, timeout, or fine.
See only the broken ones, or every link checked, and export the lot to CSV for your outreach or your fix list.
These are two different problems and only one is expensive. Broken links from your pages are a quality signal: no direct penalty, but a post citing three dead sources reads as abandoned, and readers notice. Broken links to your pages are the costly kind — when a URL that earned backlinks starts returning 404, every link pointing at it is wasted until you redirect it somewhere sensible.
Link rot is not something you cause; it is something that happens to you. Sites get redesigned, companies get acquired, blogs get deleted, and every link you placed years ago quietly stops working. Nothing on your side changes, so nothing alerts you. The only way to know is to re-check periodically, which is exactly what this tool is for — a quick pass over your most-linked pages every few months catches almost all of it.
Find a resource page or roundup in your niche, run it through the checker, and look at the dead entries. Each one is a small, genuine favour you can do the page owner: tell them the link is broken and mention you have something comparable. The reply rate on that email is far better than a cold pitch, because you are leading with something useful rather than asking. It is slow, but it produces editorial links from pages that already rank.
On your own pages: update the link to a live equivalent where one exists, point it at an archived copy if the content still matters, or remove it if it does not. Do not simply delete every dead link without reading — a citation that supports a claim needs replacing, not deleting. On other people's pages, the broken link is an opening for outreach, not a fix you can make.
A broken link scan answers “does this link work?”. The other half of the question is “is it worth anything?” — check whether a page's links are dofollow or nofollow, how strong the site is with a Domain Rating check, and how long it has been around with a domain age check. A resource page with dead links, real authority and dofollow outbound links is the single best broken-link-building target there is.
A broken link is a link whose destination no longer responds correctly — most often a 404 Not Found, but also 410 Gone, a server error, or a domain that has stopped resolving entirely. The link still looks normal on the page; it only fails when someone clicks it. That is why they accumulate quietly: nothing on your own site changes when someone else's page disappears.
Paste the page URL above and the checker requests every link on it, reporting the status of each. By hand you would have to open every link and watch for errors, which is impractical past a handful. This runs them together and shows only the failures unless you ask for the full list.
Two reasons, and they are different. Outbound broken links are mainly a user-experience and quality problem — Google does not penalise you for them directly, but a page full of dead references reads as unmaintained. Inbound broken links are the expensive kind: when a page that earned backlinks starts 404ing, the authority those links carried is wasted rather than redirected.
It is one of the oldest legitimate link-building tactics. You find a resource page in your niche that links out to something now dead, you have a genuinely comparable page, and you email the owner pointing out the broken link and offering yours as a replacement. It works because you are doing them a favour first. This tool is the finding step — paste any resource page and it shows you which of its links are dead.
Yes. A link that 301s to a working page is reported as fine, because for a visitor it is. Only the final destination's status counts. A redirect chain ending in a 404 is correctly reported as broken.
Some servers deliberately reject automated requests. We try a lightweight HEAD request first and retry with a normal GET when a server rejects it, which clears most false alarms. A link still showing 403 after both attempts is genuinely refusing us — it may well work in your browser, so it is worth a manual look before you act on it.
Up to 40 per scan, external links by default, and it tells you when a page has more than that. The cap exists because each scan makes a real request to every destination — keeping it bounded is what lets the tool stay free and stay a good citizen of the web.
No, and that is deliberate. This checks one page at a time. A full-site crawler that anyone can point anywhere is a very different thing to run responsibly. If you need a whole site swept, a desktop crawler like Screaming Frog is the right tool; this is for checking a specific page quickly.
No. The scan reads the HTML the server returns, which is what crawlers see first. Links injected client-side after page load are not included. For resource pages, blog posts and directories — the pages where broken links actually matter — the server HTML has everything.
Finding dead links is the easy part — the outreach is the work. Tell us your domain and we'll hand-pick placements on vetted, real-traffic sites instead. Free shortlist, human-reviewed, SaaS-only.
Get my free shortlist