Broken Link Checker

Find the dead pages your sitemap is still advertising. Enter a domain and we will locate the sitemap, then check where each URL actually lands. Free, no account.

Scope worth knowing up front: this checks the URLs listed in your sitemap, not every link inside your pages. For links on a page, use the bulk URL checker.

Checks up to 25 URLs per scan. A bare domain is discovered the way a crawler would.

The one a status check misses

A URL in your sitemap that redirects to a deleted page is invisible to most checks. Ask for the status of the listed URL and you get 301: entirely healthy, exactly what you configured. The 404 is at the other end of the hop.

This scan follows the chain and reports the status where it ends, so that case shows up and is labelled as reached through a redirect. It is the most common way a migration loses pages quietly: the redirect map was written, the redirects work, and some of them point at URLs that were renamed again afterwards.

The other thing worth knowing is that a sitemap is a claim, not evidence. Nothing regenerates it when a page is deleted unless something is configured to, so sitemaps drift out of date on their own and keep pointing crawlers at pages that stopped existing months ago.

Questions

Why do dead URLs in a sitemap matter?
A sitemap is a list of pages you are asking search engines to crawl. Every URL on it that answers 404 spends crawl budget on a page that is not there, and does it again on every visit. On a large site that is a measurable share of the crawling you actually wanted spent elsewhere. It also tells the engine your sitemap is unreliable, which is not a signal worth sending.

Does this crawl my whole site for broken links?
No. It reads your sitemap and checks the URLs listed in it. It does not crawl your pages looking for broken links inside their content, and it does not check outbound links to other sites. If you need that, a crawler such as Screaming Frog is the right shape of tool. What this catches is the case where your sitemap still advertises pages you deleted or renamed.

How many URLs does the free scan check?
Up to 25 per scan, taken from the start of your sitemap. That is a sampling limit rather than a paywall trick: each check is a live HTTP request made from our servers, and the free tier is 200 URLs per day per IP with no account. If your sitemap is larger, the scan reports how many it found and how many it checked.

It says a URL is broken but it loads in my browser. Why?
Usually one of three things. The page may be behind a login or a geo restriction, so it answers 404 or 403 to anyone not signed in, including search engines. A security plugin or WAF may be refusing unfamiliar clients. Or your browser is showing a cached copy of a page that is now gone. The status here is what an anonymous crawler receives, which is the one that decides whether the page gets indexed.

What about a URL that redirects to a dead page?
It is caught, and flagged separately. The status shown is the one at the end of the redirect chain, not the first hop. This matters because the listed URL honestly answers 301, so a checker that reads only the first status calls it healthy. A redirect pointing at a deleted page is one of the most common ways a site migration quietly loses pages.

Can this run automatically instead of when I remember?
Yes, on a paid plan. The sitemap watcher re-reads your sitemap on a schedule, and any URL that answers 4xx or 5xx is withheld from submission rather than sent to search engines, with an email telling you which pages broke. Free is the same check run once by hand.