How to Find Broken Links on Any Website (3 Free Methods)

August 23, 2026 · 8 min read · Broken Link Checker team

There are three free ways to find broken links, and they answer different questions. A browser extension checks the page you're looking at, right now, in seconds. A web-based crawler walks an entire site and reports every dead URL it finds. And Google Search Console shows you the 404s Google has already hit — including ones other sites link to. Most people need the first method weekly and the other two occasionally. Here's how each works and when to use it.

First: what actually counts as a broken link?

A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a resource which no longer responds with usable content. In practice that means the target returns:

• 404 Not Found or 410 Gone — the page doesn't exist (anymore);
• 5xx server errors — the server exists but fails to answer;
• a network failure — the domain doesn't resolve or the connection is refused;
• a timeout — the server never answers at all.

Two things are not broken links, even though many tools report them as if they were. Redirects (301/302) still deliver a page — they're worth reviewing, but a link that redirects works for your visitors. And bot-blocked links — sites that answer automated requests with 403 or a CAPTCHA — usually open fine in a real browser. A good checker separates all three categories instead of dumping them into one scary red list. (For a full breakdown of the codes, see our guide to HTTP status codes for link checking.)

Method 1: a Chrome extension — for the pages in front of you

This is the everyday method. You install the extension once, and from then on any page can be checked in one click: the extension collects every link in the page — including links inside frames and embedded widgets — requests each one, and shows the results next to the page, usually highlighting the dead links right where they sit in the layout.

With our own Broken Link Checker the flow looks like this:

1. Open the page you want to check — an article you're about to publish, a landing page, a resources list.
2. Click the extension icon. The scan starts immediately.
3. Watch the side panel fill in: valid links, redirects, blocked links, and broken ones — each with its status code.
4. Click any broken result to see it highlighted on the page, fix it in your CMS, and rescan.
5. Need a record? Export the results to CSV.

Best for: editors checking an article before it goes live, SEO specialists auditing a specific landing page, developers verifying a release, anyone who just noticed something odd on a page.

Limits to know: an extension checks one page at a time — the page you have open. It won't discover a dead URL buried on a page you never visit. That's what the next two methods are for. On the other hand, everything runs locally in your browser: nothing is uploaded to a third-party server, there's no crawl queue, and it works on pages a public crawler could never reach — intranets, staging environments, pages behind a login.

Method 2: a web-based crawler — for whole sites

Web-based checkers work like a tiny search engine: you give them your homepage URL, they fetch it, follow every internal link, then follow the links on those pages, and so on until they've mapped the site. At the end you get a report of every broken URL and — crucially — which pages link to it, so you know where to make the fix.

Best for: the periodic deep clean. Run one after a migration or redesign, when you inherit a site, or a few times a year as a health check.

Limits to know: free tiers usually cap the number of pages and can queue your scan behind other users. Crawlers can't see pages behind logins or on staging servers, and aggressive crawling sometimes gets them blocked, producing false positives. They also check the site as a crawler sees it — links added by JavaScript after load are often missed.

Method 3: Google Search Console — for the 404s Google found

If you own the site, Google Search Console is free and shows a different slice of the problem: the URLs Google tried to crawl and couldn't. Open Indexing → Pages and look at the "Not found (404)" bucket.

This catches something no on-page scan can: inbound broken links. When another website links to a page you deleted or renamed, that link never appears in your own HTML — but Google follows it, records the 404, and tells you about it. Each of those is a visitor (and link equity) you can reclaim with a redirect. We cover that in how to fix broken links.

Limits to know: Search Console is slow-moving — it reports what Googlebot happened to crawl, weeks of delay included. It says nothing about broken outbound links on your pages (dead references, expired partner domains), which is most of what visitors actually click. Use it alongside a page-level check, not instead of one.

Which method should you use?

How often should you check?

Links don't break when you publish them — they break later, silently, as the sites you linked to reorganize or disappear. Research on link rot found that 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later, so a "checked once, clean forever" mindset doesn't work. A sustainable routine:

• Every new page — scan before publishing (seconds with an extension).
• Key pages — home, pricing, top-traffic articles: monthly.
• Whole site — after every migration or redesign, and a couple of times a year.
• Search Console — glance at the 404 report monthly and redirect anything with inbound links.

Why bother? Beyond annoyed visitors, dead links quietly erode search performance — the mechanics are in do broken links hurt SEO?

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