Why we built this
Broken links are one of the most common and most fixable problems on the web. They hurt SEO rankings, frustrate visitors, and quietly erode trust in a site — but most site owners don't realise how many they have until someone complains. Paid tools to catch them are expensive, and free ones often cap crawls at a handful of pages or block external link checking altogether.
We built Broken Link Finder to scratch our own itch: a tool that will crawl a site, follow its internal links, check every external link it finds, and give a clean report of what's broken — all without a signup, an upsell, or a crawl limit that only covers the homepage. It uses real HTTP requests, not just status code lookups, so it catches soft 404s and redirect loops that other tools miss.
How the scanner works
When you submit a URL, we fetch the page using a real HTTP request, parse the HTML for every <a href> element, resolve relative and protocol-relative URLs to absolute ones, deduplicate the list, and then check each link in parallel batches. For each link we record the HTTP status code, response time, redirect chain (if any), and the anchor text from the original page. Links are categorised as working (2xx), redirect (3xx), broken (4xx/5xx), or timeout/error. We cap each scan at 150 links per page to keep response times fast — most pages have far fewer, and pages with more usually have a structural issue worth addressing separately.
Two technical details worth knowing about. First, we deliberately do not follow redirects when checking links — we want to show you that a link is a 301 or 302, not hide that fact by reporting only the final destination. Second, we send a HEAD request first to save bandwidth, then fall back to a GET request (with a small range header) for servers that don't support HEAD. This catches a category of broken links that simpler tools miss.
Who's behind it
The tool is built and maintained by a small Australian web development studio that's been shipping web software since the early 2000s. We use this scanner ourselves when auditing client sites, and we've kept it free, signup-free, and without crawl limits because we think tools developers use every day should be that way.
Get in touch
Found a bug? Got a feature request? Want to tell us about a site we scanned incorrectly? Head to our contact page and send us a message — we read every one.