How to Find and Fix Broken Links Across Your Whole Site

To find broken links on your website, crawl every page with a site auditor, collect each link that returns a 404 or 5xx status, then fix them by updating the URL, restoring the page, or adding a redirect. You do not click through your site by hand. A crawler visits each page, follows every link, and hands you one list of what is broken and where it lives. That list is the whole job.

Why do broken links matter so much?

A broken link is a dead end. Someone clicks, hits a 404, and leaves. But the damage runs deeper than one lost visitor.

• Crawl budget waste. Search engines follow your links too. Dead ones burn crawl time that should reach real pages.
• Lost link equity. When an internal link points to a missing page, the ranking signal it should pass just disappears.
• Trust drops. A site full of dead links reads as neglected, to humans and to algorithms.
• AI answers skip you. Assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity favor sites they can crawl cleanly. Broken links push them toward a competitor's source instead of yours.

That last point is the one most founders miss. When an AI answer recommends someone else, a dead link on your site is sometimes why it never trusted you enough to cite you. If that idea is new to you, start with what is AI visibility.

How do you find broken links on your website?

There are three ways, ordered from slowest to fastest.

1. Manual clicking. Fine for a five-page site. Useless past that. You will miss links buried in old posts and footers.
2. Browser extensions. They check one page at a time. Better than nothing, but you have to open every page yourself.
3. A full-site crawler. This is the real answer. It reads your whole site in one pass and reports every dead link with the page it sits on.

Run a crawler like the Site Audit tool. Point it at your homepage. It follows internal and external links across the entire site and returns a table of broken URLs, their status codes, and the source pages linking to them.

How do you fix a broken link once you find it?

Every broken link falls into one of a few buckets. Match the fix to the cause.

• Typo in the URL. Just correct the link. Fastest win of all.
• Page moved. Update the link to the new URL, then add a 301 redirect from the old one so outside links still land.
• Page deleted on purpose. Remove the link, or point it to the closest living page.
• External site changed. Swap in the new URL, find a replacement source, or drop the link entirely.
• Temporary server error. Recheck later. A 5xx can be a blip, but a persistent one needs a fix on the host.

How often should you check for broken links?

Once a month for an active site, once a quarter for a slow one. Links rot on their own. External pages vanish, you rename slugs, plugins break paths. A quick recurring crawl keeps small problems from piling up into a site that search engines and AI models quietly stop trusting.

Broken links are one of the cheapest SEO fixes you will ever make. The finding is automated, the fixing is mechanical, and the payoff shows up in both rankings and AI citations. Pair a link check with a wider free SEO audit and you cover most of what quietly holds a small site back.