VerflinkDead Link Checker
A dead link and a broken link are the same thing: a URL that no longer leads anywhere useful. Verflink crawls your whole site, follows every link it finds, and reports the ones that are dead, whether that means a 404, a timeout, or a redirect that lands somewhere it should not. Paste your URL to see which of your links are dead right now.
What does a dead link checker do?
A dead link checker requests every link on your site and reports the ones whose destination no longer answers with a working page. Dead and broken describe the same failure here, and what matters is only that the click leads nowhere. Verflink checks the whole site rather than one URL at a time, and confirms a failure on more than one request before calling anything dead. A link goes dead the same handful of ways every time: the page it pointed to was deleted, the site it lived on shut down or moved without a redirect, or the domain expired outright. From a reader's side these all look the same, a click that leads nowhere, so a dead link checker treats them the same way: it requests each link, and if the destination does not answer with a working page, it is reported as dead. Verflink does this across your whole site, not one link at a time, and confirms a dead link on more than one request before reporting it, so a brief outage is not mistaken for a link that is actually gone.
What Verflink checks
- ✓Dead pages: 404s and destinations that no longer exist
- ✓Dead sites: domains that no longer resolve or no longer respond
- ✓Redirects that used to reach a live page and now land somewhere unrelated
- ✓Both internal links and outbound links to other sites
- ✓Pages that technically load but show out-of-stock or unavailable content
- ✓Affiliate links, checked first and flagged if their tag went missing
How it works
- 1Enter your website
- 2Verflink scans your links
- 3Review broken or problematic URLs
- 4Fix the issues
What this looks like on a resources page
A resources page collects forty links to tools and references gathered over five years. Today three of those domains no longer resolve at all. Two more return a registrar parking page with a perfectly healthy 200 status, so a checker that only reads status codes calls them fine and moves on. One redirects to a homepage because the article behind it was quietly dropped in a redesign, which means the link technically works and delivers the reader nowhere near what you cited. Verflink reports the three that fail to resolve as dead, flags the parked pages that answer but hold no real content, and shows where the surviving redirect actually lands so you can judge it yourself.
Why links go dead without anyone noticing
A link does not announce that it died. The site you linked to shuts down quietly, the page gets deleted in a redesign, and nothing on your side changes, so nothing tells you. The only way to find out is to click it, or to have something click it for you. That is what a dead link checker is for: it does the clicking, on a schedule, so a link that dies the week after your last check does not sit dead for months before a reader stumbles into it.
Dead links accumulate faster than most people expect: 38% of the webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer reachable by October 2023, and about a quarter of all pages from the 2013 to 2023 decade had already gone. Source: Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" (2024).
FAQ
What is a dead link checker?
A tool that checks whether the links on your site still lead to a working page. A dead link is one where the destination no longer answers, whether because the page was removed, the site shut down, or the domain stopped resolving.
Is a dead link the same as a broken link?
Yes, they describe the same thing: a link whose destination no longer works. Verflink treats them identically and checks for both under the hood.
How does Verflink know a link is really dead and not just slow?
It confirms the failure on more than one request before reporting a link as dead, so a single timeout or temporary hiccup is not mistaken for a link that is actually gone.
Does it check links to other websites, not just my own pages?
Yes. Verflink checks every outbound link on a page, so links pointing to other sites are covered along with the internal links between your own pages.
Can Verflink keep checking for dead links automatically?
Yes. After you verify you own the site, Verflink re-scans it every month and emails you when a link that used to work has gone dead.
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
More checkers: Reddit link checker · Affiliate link checker · Broken link checker · Blog link checker · Automated broken link checker · Bulk broken link checker