What Is a Broken Link Checker?
This broken link checker takes one specific link you already know is broken - a URL returning a 404 or otherwise failing - and finds every page on that site still pointing to it. Enter the link, and it discovers the site's sitemap, checks every page listed there (up to 300 of them), and reports back exactly which pages still reference it, with the anchor text and how many times it appears on each one. If nothing references it, it tells you that plainly instead of leaving you to guess.
That's a different starting point than most broken link checkers, which crawl a page or site outward and report whatever they happen to find broken. This one works backward from a known broken link - the kind you get from Google Search Console's crawl errors, a customer complaint, a 404 log, or a redirect audit - straight to every page that needs fixing, without you having to click through the site hunting for where it's linked from. Entire-website link auditing - crawling a whole domain outward to discover broken links you didn't already know about - is in development as a premium feature.
How to Use This Broken Link Checker
- Enter the broken link. The full URL of the page (or image) you already know is broken, e.g.
https://www.example.com/broken-link/. - Verify you're human and run it. Complete the quick reCAPTCHA check. The search runs in the background with live progress, since a large sitemap takes longer than a single page fetch.
- Read the results. Every page that still links or points an image to that URL is listed, with its anchor/alt text and how many times it appears on that page. A live check of the link itself shows its current status at the top.
- Export what you need. Copy the table or download it as a CSV to hand off to whoever's fixing the links.
How the Search Works
Sitemap discovery follows the same path a search engine would: it checks robots.txt for a declared Sitemap: directive first, then falls back to the common sitemap.xml locations, following nested sitemap-index files where present. Each listed page is then fetched and its HTML parsed for every <a href> and <img src>, resolved to an absolute URL and compared against the broken link you entered - accounting for the handful of URL variations (a trailing slash, www vs. bare, http vs. https) that browsers treat as identical but a naive text match wouldn't.
Every request - fetching the sitemap and every page in it - is validated against an SSRF safety policy before it's made, so the search can never be pointed at private or internal network addresses.
Worth knowing: this search only finds pages your sitemap actually lists. A page missing from the sitemap - deliberately excluded, or simply never added - won't be checked even if it links to the broken URL. If a search comes back with zero matches but you're certain the link is used somewhere, confirm that page is in the sitemap first.
Why Broken Links Hurt SEO
A broken link isn't a direct Google ranking factor by itself - there's no penalty line item for "has a 404." What it does is create a set of indirect and diagnostic problems that add up, and they get worse the more pages still link to the same dead URL:
- Wasted crawl budget (indirect effect): search engine bots spend part of their allotted crawl time following dead ends and logging crawl errors instead of finding your live, valuable pages - and every extra page still linking to the same broken URL adds another dead end.
- Lost link equity (indirect effect): an internal link that 404s breaks the chain that passes ranking signal between your own pages, for every page still linking to it.
- Worse user experience (behavioral signal): visitors who hit a dead link are more likely to leave, and engagement signals are something search engines account for over time, even without a named "bounce rate" ranking factor.
- Trust and E-E-A-T signals (best-practice): a link that's been broken long enough to be reported and still isn't fixed across every page referencing it can read as poorly maintained, which factors into how both users and search engines judge a site's trustworthiness.
What Is the Best Free Broken Link Checker?
It depends on where you're starting from. If you already have a specific broken link - from Search Console, a 404 log, or a bug report - and need to know every page that still references it, a sitemap-driven search like this one gets there directly without a full site crawl. If you're starting from nothing and want to discover broken links you don't already know about, a page-outward or whole-site crawler is the right tool instead. And Google Search Console is not itself a broken link checker - its Pages report shows crawl errors Googlebot already ran into (labeled things like "Not Found (404)"), which is exactly where a known broken link usually comes from, but it won't tell you which of your own pages still link to it.
This Tool vs. Other Ways to Find Broken Links
| Method | Starting Point | Finds Every Referencing Page | No Install/Login | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This broken link checker | One known broken link | Yes, via the sitemap | Yes | Fixing every page linking to a link you already know is dead |
| Ctrl+F / site search | A known link, one page at a time | Only pages you manually check | Yes | A handful of pages you already suspect |
| Google Search Console | Whatever Googlebot has crawled | No - reports the broken URL, not what links to it | Requires a verified property | Discovering that a broken link exists in the first place |
| Desktop crawler software (e.g. Screaming Frog) | The whole site, crawled outward | Yes, as part of a full crawl | Requires install; free tier caps at 500 URLs | Discovering broken links across a large site from scratch |
What Each Result Column Means
- Page Found On: the page whose HTML still contains a link or image pointing at the broken URL you searched for.
- Type: Text Link for an
<a href>reference, or Image for an<img src>reference. - Anchor / Alt Text: the clickable text the link was wrapped in, or the image's alt attribute - tells you exactly what to search for in your CMS to find and fix it.
- Occurrences: how many separate places on that one page reference the broken link - e.g. a value of 3 means it's repeated in three different spots (header, footer, and body content, for instance), not just once.
Above the table, a status badge shows the broken link's own current live status (its HTTP code, checked at the start of the search), and stat tiles summarize how many sitemap pages were found, how many were checked, and how many still reference the link.
Practical Examples
https://shop.example.com/products/discontinued-item/, a 404 Search Console reported
Found on 5 pages: 3 category pages, the homepage's "Recently Viewed" widget, and one blog post.
The product was removed but nothing updated the pages that used to link to it.
Update the 5 pages to link to a replacement or current product, or remove the links if there's no equivalent.
An old /services/ URL that no longer resolves after a site restructure
Found on 18 of 40 sitemap pages, each with an occurrence count of 1 - it's in a shared footer link.
The footer template still points at the old URL; every page using that footer inherited the broken link.
Fix the link once in the shared footer template rather than editing all 18 pages individually.
The same broken link from a previous search, re-run after updating the pages that referenced it
No page found that contains this broken link - the target status badge also shows the link itself now redirects.
Every referencing page was updated and no page in the sitemap points at the dead URL anymore.
None needed - this is the confirmation step worth running after any broken-link cleanup.
Expert recommendation: when a broken link shows a high occurrence count on one page, check whether it's coming from a shared template (nav, footer, a sidebar widget) before editing anything - fixing the template once is faster and less error-prone than editing every page that includes it, and confirms the fix will apply everywhere at once.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Assuming zero results means the link isn't used anywhere. It means no page in the sitemap references it - a page missing from the sitemap could still link to it. Confirm your sitemap is current before trusting a "no matches" result.
- Fixing pages one at a time when the link comes from a shared template. A high occurrence count spread across many pages is usually one template fix, not many separate ones.
- Treating a 403 the same as a 404 for the target link. A 403 on the status badge often means a firewall or bot-protection rule blocked the automated check, not that the page is actually gone - verify manually before assuming it's broken.
- Never re-running the search after a fix. Re-run it against the same link once you've updated the referencing pages to confirm nothing was missed.
Real-World Use Cases
- Search Console cleanup: working through a list of 404s Google Search Console reported, one link at a time, to find and fix every page still referencing each one.
- Post-migration audits: after a URL structure change, checking each old URL pattern to find which pages still link to it.
- Customer-reported dead links: a visitor reports a broken link; this finds every other page on the site with the same problem, not just the one they hit.
- Redirect planning: before setting up a 301 redirect for a retired page, confirming exactly how many (and which) pages still link to it.
- Fix verification: re-running the same search after a cleanup to confirm no referencing page was missed.
Related SEO Concepts
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period - broken links waste part of it on dead ends. Link equity is the ranking value passed between pages through links; a broken internal link breaks that chain for every page still linking to it. Link rot describes how, left unchecked, outbound links decay toward broken over months and years as the sites they point to change or disappear - it's a maintenance problem, not a one-time fix, which is why re-running a search against a previously-fixed link is worth doing periodically. An XML sitemap is the file this search relies on to know which pages exist - a site with an incomplete or stale sitemap will get an incomplete search result.
Limitations to Keep in Mind
- Only pages listed in the site's sitemap are checked - a page missing from the sitemap won't be found even if it links to the broken URL.
- The search covers up to 300 sitemap pages per run - a much larger sitemap's remaining pages aren't covered in one pass.
- Some servers block or rate-limit automated requests differently than real browser traffic, which can occasionally cause a page that does contain the link to be skipped.
- Results reflect a single point in time - re-run the search after making fixes to confirm they took effect.
- This is an on-demand search, not continuous monitoring - for ongoing alerts, re-run it on a regular schedule or after major content changes.
AudEsto runs this checker on the same SSRF-hardened infrastructure behind its full SEO audit engine and its Orphan Page Checker. Enter a known broken link above to see exactly which pages still need fixing.