Feature Guide

Broken Link Detection

Find dead links before your visitors — and search engines — do.

Few things make a website feel neglected faster than a “page not found” error. Broken links frustrate visitors, hurt your search rankings, and cost you customers who were one click from what they wanted. Broken Link Detection finds those dead ends for you: Crafty Meerkat’s site crawler scans your pages for links that lead to 404 errors (the “page not found” response) or unreachable pages, then reports them in your dashboard so you can fix them.

Broken links rarely come from carelessness — they come from time. A law office renames its “Practice Areas” page during a redesign, and every old link to it dies quietly. A supplier the site linked to three years ago goes out of business. A blog post references a tool that moved its pricing page. Sites accumulate broken links the way houses accumulate dust, which is why one-time cleanups don’t stick and regular monitoring does.

Crafty Meerkat catches breakage from two directions. The crawler checks the links written into your pages — both internal links between your own pages and external links out to other sites. Meanwhile, the tracking snippet automatically records real 404 hits from actual visitors, so you also see the dead pages people are genuinely landing on, including from old bookmarks and stale links on other websites you could never crawl yourself.

How it works

The site crawler visits your pages the way a visitor would, follows the links it finds, and notes every one that returns an error or fails to load. Results appear in your dashboard alongside your site profile, listing what is broken and where it was found — so fixing it is a matter of opening the right page, not hunting through the whole site.

You can refresh the crawl manually anytime. On Growth and Agency plans the crawler re-runs automatically every day, so new breakage is caught within a day of appearing instead of whenever you next remember to check.

Step by step

1
Open your Site Profile
In your dashboard, select your site and click Site Profile in the sidebar. The crawler’s findings — including broken links — live here alongside your page structure and technology overview.
2
Review the broken links list
Each entry shows the dead destination and the page it was found on. Internal links (to your own pages) are usually quick fixes; external links (to other sites) may need a replacement or removal.
3
Fix and re-crawl
Update or remove the broken links on your site, then trigger a fresh crawl to confirm the list comes back clean.
4
Watch real 404 hits in your Analytics
The Events card on your Analytics page shows 404 hits from real visitors — dead ends the crawler can’t see, like old bookmarks or outdated links on other websites pointing at pages you moved.

Tips from the den

◆Fix internal broken links first — they are entirely within your control and are the ones search engines hold against you most directly.
◆When you rename or delete a page, set up a redirect from the old address to the new one; it repairs every existing link to that page in one move, including links from other sites.
◆After any redesign or platform migration, run a fresh crawl the same week — restructures are when the largest batches of links break at once.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

What is the difference between crawler-found links and 404 hits?

The crawler finds broken links written into your pages before anyone clicks them. The 404 hits in your Events card are real visitors actually landing on missing pages — often via old bookmarks or links from other websites. You want both views: one is prevention, the other is evidence.

Does it check links to other websites too?

Yes. The crawler checks both internal links between your own pages and external links out to other sites, since a dead outbound link frustrates visitors just as much.

How often should I check for broken links?

On Growth and Agency plans the crawler re-runs automatically every day, so a weekly glance at the results is plenty. On Starter, refresh the crawl manually after publishing new content or changing page addresses.