How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website (2026)
Broken links — pages returning 404 — waste your crawl budget, bleed link equity, and frustrate users. Here's how to find every dead link on your site and fix them systematically.
Why broken links hurt your SEO
Lost link equity
Inbound links pointing to 404 pages pass zero authority. Fix them with 301 redirects to recover that PageRank.
Wasted crawl budget
Googlebot has a limited crawl budget per site. Every 404 it hits is a wasted crawl that could have indexed a real page.
Poor user experience
Users hitting 404 pages bounce immediately. High bounce rate signals to Google that your site isn't worth ranking.
Step 1 — Find all broken links
AuditAI Broken Link Checker (free)
RecommendedPaste your URL at auditai.fyi/tools/broken-links. AuditAI crawls your page and flags every 404, redirect chain, and dead link — no login required. Works on any live site.
Google Search Console
RecommendedGo to Index → Pages → filter by 'Not found (404)'. GSC shows pages Google tried to crawl but got a 404. These are your highest-priority fixes because Google has already indexed links to them.
Ahrefs or Semrush site audit
Paid tools crawl your entire site and report all internal and external broken links. Good for large sites (100+ pages) where manual checking isn't feasible.
Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs)
Free desktop crawler. Run it locally to get a full report of all 4xx and 5xx responses across your site.
Step 2 — Prioritise what to fix
Not all broken links are equal. Fix in this order:
- 1st
Broken pages with inbound backlinks
These are the most valuable. Use Ahrefs or Google Search Console to find 404s that external sites link to. Set up 301 redirects to the closest relevant live page.
- 2nd
Broken internal links on high-traffic pages
A broken link on your homepage or a top-ranked blog post is worse than one buried in a footer. Fix these first to preserve user experience.
- 3rd
All other internal 404s
Systematically go through your broken links report and either restore the page, redirect it, or remove the link.
- 4th
Broken external links
Links pointing to dead external pages don't pass authority but do hurt user experience. Either update to the current URL, find an alternative source, or remove the link.
Step 3 — Fix broken links with 301 redirects
A 301 redirect tells Google and browsers that a page has permanently moved. It passes approximately 90% of link equity to the new destination.
// next.config.js
redirects: async () => [{
source: '/old-page',
destination: '/new-page',
permanent: true,
}]Redirect 301 /old-page /new-page
rewrite ^/old-page$ /new-page permanent;
Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects → Add redirect
Prevent broken links in future
- ✓Run a broken link check every month (set a calendar reminder)
- ✓Before deleting or renaming a page, check if anything links to it
- ✓Monitor Google Search Console Crawl Errors weekly
- ✓Add a custom 404 page that links to your sitemap and popular pages
- ✓Use relative URLs for internal links so they survive domain changes
Find broken links on your site free
AuditAI's broken link checker crawls any page and flags every 404, redirect chain, and dead link instantly.
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