VerflinkAutomated Broken Link Checker
Most link checkers wait for you. You remember to visit the tool, paste a URL, and read a list. An automated broken link checker removes that step: Verflink re-crawls your whole site on a schedule and emails you when a link that used to work stops working. Paste your URL to run the first scan, then let it run itself.
What makes a link checker automated?
An automated broken link checker runs on a schedule instead of on demand, compares each run against the one before it, and tells you when a link that used to work has broken. What it hands you is not a list of links, it is a change. Three things, and a tool needs all three. It has to run on a schedule instead of on demand, so nobody has to remember it. It has to compare each run against the previous one, because the useful signal is not the list of links, it is the change: a link that passed last month and fails today. And it has to reach you where you already are, which means an email when something breaks rather than a dashboard you would have to think to open. A one-off scan tells you the state of your site the moment you ran it, which starts going stale immediately. Automation is what turns a link check into monitoring.
What Verflink checks
- ✓Scheduled monthly re-crawls of the whole site, no manual trigger
- ✓Change detection: links that worked last month and fail now
- ✓Email alerts when a link breaks, so you find out before your readers
- ✓Every outbound link on every page, not a sample or a page cap
- ✓Affiliate and monetised links checked first and flagged separately
- ✓A shareable report for every run, so you can hand it to a client
How it works
- 1Enter your website
- 2Verflink scans your links
- 3Review broken or problematic URLs
- 4Fix the issues
What happens in the months after a one-off scan
You scan a site in March and fix the nine dead links it reports, and the site is genuinely clean that afternoon. In April a supplier retires a product line and 404s a dozen URLs you link to from your buying guides. In June a source you cite across eleven different posts lets its domain lapse, and it starts resolving to a parking page. Nothing on your side changes in either month, because those are other people's servers and your pages still load perfectly. Your March report is still sitting in your inbox looking authoritative, and it stopped describing your site in April. A scheduled re-crawl is the only thing that would have told you.
Why a one-off scan is not enough
Links do not break when you are looking at them. A shop retires a product page, a source you cited moves host, an affiliate programme kills a URL and redirects it to a homepage that pays nothing. None of it shows up as an error in your analytics, and nobody writes to tell you. So the gap that costs you is not the breakage itself, it is the months between the break and the day you notice. Running a scan today does nothing about a link that dies in three weeks. Monitoring on a schedule is the only version of this that keeps working after you close the tab.
The web does not hold still between scans: 38% of the webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer reachable when researchers checked them in October 2023. Source: Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" (2024).
FAQ
What is an automated broken link checker?
A tool that checks your site for broken links on a schedule rather than only when you ask it to, compares each run against the last, and notifies you when something that used to work has broken.
How is this different from a free broken link checker?
Free checkers are built around a single manual scan: you paste a URL and read the result. That is genuinely useful once. The difference here is that the check repeats on its own and tells you when something changes, so a link that breaks after your scan still reaches you.
How often does Verflink check my links?
Every month on each site you have verified, automatically. You can also run a scan manually at any time from your dashboard.
Do I get an alert when a link breaks?
Yes. When a link that worked in the previous run fails in the current one, Verflink emails you with the page it sits on, so the fix means opening one post rather than searching your archive.
Do I need to install a plugin?
No. Verflink crawls your public pages from our servers, so there is nothing to install and nothing to add to your theme. It works on any platform.
Can I monitor more than one site?
Yes. Monitoring is per account, so you can add every site you own, including old blogs and side projects, which is usually where dead links have been piling up unnoticed.
Background reading: what link rot is, why it costs you, and how often to check.
Guides: Do broken links on an ecommerce site hurt sales and SEO? · How to find broken affiliate links
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