Dead link checker
Paste your homepage. We crawl your website, request every link, image and file it contains, and tell you which ones are dead — and which ones we could not verify, instead of guessing.
Dead link or broken link: is there a difference?
Most people use the two words for the same thing, and so do most tools. There is a useful nuance, though. A dead link points to something that is gone: the page was deleted, the file removed, the domain left to expire. A broken link is the wider family: anything that fails when clicked, including a typo in the URL, a server error, a missing #anchor or an image that no longer loads.
The nuance matters when you fix them. A dead link needs a new destination, or has to go. A broken link sometimes only needs its URL corrected. Our guide to broken links covers the causes and the fixes in more detail.
What a dead link looks like to a checker
A checker never sees the page the way you do. It sends a request and reads the status code the server sends back. Here is how Broken Link Scan reads each answer:
| Server answer | What it usually means | In your report |
|---|---|---|
| 200 to 399, after following redirects | The page exists. | OK |
| 404 Not Found | Nothing exists at this address. | Broken |
| 410 Gone | The page was removed on purpose. | Broken, on your own site |
| 500 and other server errors | The server failed to produce the page. | Broken |
| 401, 403 | A login is required, or a firewall is refusing robots. | Skipped |
| 429 Too Many Requests | The server is rate-limiting us. | Skipped |
| 502, 503, 504 | The server or a gateway is temporarily unavailable. | Skipped |
| No answer within 10 seconds | A slow server, a refused connection or a domain that no longer resolves. | Skipped |
| More than 10 redirects | The redirects never reach a page. | Redirect loop |
| 200 OK on a “page not found” screen | A soft 404. | OK: no status code gives it away |
On links to pages of other websites we are stricter about the word broken: only a 404 or a server error counts. Anything else on someone else's server is not a defect you can fix on your site, so we do not list it as one.
Soft 404s, timeouts, redirect chains and anchors
- Soft 404s. The server answers 200 OK but shows a “not found” message, or sends every missing URL to the homepage. No checker that relies on status codes, ours included, can tell that apart from a real page. Google lists them as “Soft 404” in the Pages report of Search Console. More in what is a soft 404.
- Timeouts. A server that does not answer in time is not necessarily gone: it may be slow, overloaded or blocking robots. We try a second time with a full GET request before deciding, and if neither attempt gets an answer, the link is listed as skipped so you can open it yourself.
- Redirect chains. We follow redirects, up to ten hops, and judge the link by the page it finally lands on. A chain that ends on a 404 is a dead link; a chain that never ends is reported as a redirect loop. To see every hop of a single URL, use the redirect checker.
- Broken anchors. A link to
/pricing#faqcan load fine and still drop the visitor at the top of the page if the#faqsection is gone. On your own pages, we check that the anchor still exists.
How our dead link checker decides
- We start from the URL you paste, read your sitemap if you have one, and follow internal links page by page: up to 500 pages on a free scan.
- Every link, image and file found on those pages gets a real HTTP request from our servers, identified as
BrokenLinkScan. - We ask with a light HEAD request first. If the server answers with an error or not at all, we ask again with a full GET, because many firewalls and some applications answer HEAD differently from a real visit.
- Answers that prove nothing — a firewall refusal, a rate limit, a temporary outage — are listed as skipped, never as broken. We would rather tell you we could not check a link than call a live page dead.
- Each broken link comes with its status code and the page it was found on, so you know exactly where to fix it.
A website broken link checker, not a URL tester
Testing one URL tells you whether that page is up. A website broken link checker works the other way round: it opens your pages and tests everything they point to, because that is where a dead link costs you a visitor. If what you have is a list of URLs, for example after a migration, the bulk checker or the HTTP status checker will be faster.
How common are dead links?
Between 15 April and 31 August 2026, Broken Link Scan checked 6,501,595 links across 886 websites. 7.96% of them were dead — roughly one link in thirteen. The method and the full dataset are in The State of Broken Links 2026.