Broken Link Checker & Link Audit Tool

Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler that audits your entire site (free up to 500 URLs, paid above that). Dr. Link Check is a hosted single-page link checker with a freemium model. This tool sits between them: single-page audits, hosted, completely free with a 5-audit-per-day per-IP cap. The differentiator is the audit dashboard plus actionable insights — most free tools just list broken links and stop; this one classifies internal vs external, nofollow ratio, anchor text quality, security risks, and surfaces the findings as plain-English recommendations.

Some sites block automated checks. Cloudflare-protected pages, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and a few others return 403 or 503 to anything that looks like a bot, even though the page works fine in a browser. We flag these responses with a ⚠️ "Ambiguous" badge rather than a red "broken" badge. Always verify any flagged link manually before deleting or replacing it.

Yes — manually for now. Audit a competitor's resource page, filter the results table to Broken + External, and you have a list of broken outbound links on that page. Each one is a link-building opportunity: contact the page owner with your own content as a replacement. A dedicated "Broken Link Building" mode with an outreach-formatted CSV export is on the roadmap.

Not in this tool — it audits one page at a time. For full-site audits use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or Google Search Console (Pages report shows crawl errors across your whole site, free, no signup beyond Search Console verification). This tool is built for the moments when you want a fast, deep look at one specific URL — a new blog post before publishing, a competitor resource page, a high-traffic landing page.

We cap concurrency at 8 parallel link checks to avoid hammering target servers. We use a clearly-identified user-agent (SEOFirstWebLinkChecker/1.0 with a contact URL) so server admins can identify and block us if they choose. We honour a 10-second per-link timeout. We do not bypass Cloudflare challenges, CAPTCHAs or any other anti-bot measure — we surface the block to you. This tool is intended for auditing your own pages or scouting competitor resource pages, not for mass-scanning sites you don't own.

Internal = a link whose destination is on the same host as the page being audited. External = a link to a different host. By default we treat subdomains (e.g. blog.example.com vs example.com) as separate hosts; toggle "Include subdomains as internal" if you want them grouped. The internal/external split matters because internal links pass authority around your own site (helpful for SEO), while external links pass authority to other sites (less helpful for your rankings but useful for E-E-A-T signals).

nofollow is an attribute that tells search engines "don't pass authority through this link." Healthy pages typically nofollow 10–40% of their external links (paid links, untrusted UGC, sites you reference but don't want to vouch for). Below 10% can look careless on pages with lots of comment-section links; above 50% can look over-cautious. There's no universally correct ratio — the audit surfaces the figure so you can sanity-check it against the type of page.

Yes. CSV export gives you every link with its status, type, rel attributes, anchor text and response time — paste straight into a spreadsheet or a client report. JSON export gives you the same data plus response headers and the redirect chain for each link, useful if you're building automated workflows on top.