Broken Internal Link Finder
Find internal links that lead to errors
What Is the Broken Internal Link Finder?
A broken internal link costs you twice: the visitor hits a dead end, and the link value you meant to pass goes nowhere. The Broken Internal Link Finder crawls your site, checks every internal URL your pages link to, and lists each dead destination once with all the pages that link to it. A broken menu link reads as one fix, not two hundred.
Key Features
Why Internal 404s Matter More Than External Ones
You can't fix other people's sites, but every broken internal link is yours. Search engines spend crawl time on the dead URL and the link passes nothing, and visitors read it as a sign nobody looks after the site. Most come from three places: deleted pages nobody redirected, typos in hand-written links, and old menu or footer links that sit on every page.
Read the Linked-From Count First
Sort by "Linked from". A dead URL linked from 200 pages is almost always in a menu, footer or sidebar, so one template edit fixes all 200. URLs linked from one or two pages are usually typos or stale links inside an article.
Redirects Are Worth Cleaning Too
A link that goes through a redirect still works, but each hop slows the visit a little. The report lists internal links that point at redirects and where they end up, so you can update them to the final address next time you edit the page.
Common Use Cases
- Cleaning up after deleting or moving pages
- Checking a migration for links to old URLs
- Finding dead affiliate or short links on your own domain
- Monthly link maintenance on a growing blog
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Broken Internal Link Finder free?
Yes. It's free with a ProxyHorizon account, and every account gets 25 runs a day shared across all our data tools. You can read about the tool without signing in, but running it needs an account because each run fetches live data.
Does it check links to other websites?
No. It checks internal links only, from your pages to other pages on the same site. To check the outbound links on a page, use the External Link Checker.
A link shows as broken but works in my browser. Why?
Some servers answer automated requests differently from browsers. Login walls and rate limits (401, 403 and 429) are listed separately as refused rather than broken, and the report shows the exact status for everything else. If a 404 looks wrong, open the URL: it may only work with a cookie or from your location.
How many pages does it crawl?
25, 50, 100 or 250, your choice. It starts at the URL you enter and follows internal links outward, so the pages closest to the start are read first. On a site bigger than your limit, the report says how many pages it read and how many the site has at least, and describes those pages rather than the whole site. A run has about two and a half minutes to crawl; on a slow site it stops where it got to and says so.
Do you keep the crawl?
For 24 hours. The crawl behind a report is stored for a day so the other sitewide tools can reuse it for the same site and page limit, instantly and without crawling again. It only holds public pages, so anyone checking the same site that day gets the same crawl. Choose "Crawl again now" whenever you want fresh data. We also log which tool you ran and when, to apply the daily limit.
Crawling whole sites for SEO at scale?
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