Paste a page URL. We read every link and image on it and request each target, the way a crawler does: 404s, 410s, server errors, dead domains and timeouts are flagged as broken, redirects are listed with where they end, and bot walls (401, 403, 429, LinkedIn's 999) are kept apart so they don't show up as false alarms. Up to 150 links per check, internal ones first. Free, no signup.
Checks one page at a time and takes up to 30 seconds on a page with many links.
| Broken | 404 Not Found, 410 Gone, any 5xx server error, a domain that no longer exists, a connection that fails, or a redirect that ends on one of those. Visitors land on an error, and search engines spend crawl time on dead URLs. |
| Redirect | The link works, but through one or more 301/302 hops. Fine for outside links; on your own site, point the link straight at the final URL (the redirect checker shows each hop). |
| Couldn't verify | 401, 403, 429 and 999 usually mean a login page, a bot firewall (Cloudflare, Amazon, LinkedIn) or rate limiting, not a dead page. Open these in a browser before removing them. |
| Timeout | No answer within 7 seconds: the server is down or very slow right now. Try again later before calling it dead. |
Many servers answer a HEAD request (the cheap one link checkers use) wrongly, with 404 or 405 for pages that exist. Every error is re-checked with a normal GET before it is reported.
We ran this checker on these pages on 26 October 2026, from a server in Canada. Well-kept sites had no really broken links; the old W3C history page had 14. The more common trap is false alarms: Hacker News rate-limits quick requests to itself, so a naive checker would report dozens of its own links as dead.
| Page | Links and result |
|---|---|
| w3.org/History.html | 69 14 broken (404s on 1990s pages and dead domains), 3 walls, 15 redirects |
| news.ycombinator.com | 199 (150 checked) 0 really broken: 43 links answered 419/429 because HN rate-limits rapid requests to itself |
| nasa.gov | 262 (150 checked) 0 broken, 8 redirects; 21 left unchecked when the 30 s budget ran out |
| python.org | 129 0 broken, 16 redirects, 1 wall |
| github.com | 125 0 broken, 11 redirects, 3 walls |
| bbc.com/news | 146 0 broken, 2 redirects, 2 walls (403 to non-browsers) |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler | 502 (150 checked) 0 broken, 3 redirects |
| developer.mozilla.org (HTML docs) | 290 (150 checked) 0 broken |
| gov.uk | 61 0 broken, 1 wall (a survey site) |
| paulgraham.com/articles.html | 242 (150 checked) 0 broken |
| craigslist.org | 378 (150 checked) 0 broken, 2 redirects |
| stackoverflow.com, nytimes.com | none readable answered our fetch with a bot wall (403), so no links could be read |
It reads the HTML the server sends and doesn't run scripts. Links that a JavaScript app adds after loading (many React, Vue and Angular sites) won't be listed; search engines that don't render scripts miss them too. To see the page as a browser shows it, take a screenshot, or pull its rendered text and links with /v1/content, which runs a real browser:
curl "https://shotmint.creasework.com/v1/content?url=https://example.com&format=markdown" \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY"This check also runs over the Shotmint API, free with any key (500 checks a day, 0 credits), so a weekly job can catch link rot on your key pages. Each call checks up to 150 links (internal first) within 30 seconds:
curl -s "https://shotmint.creasework.com/v1/check?type=links&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenshot" \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY"
# {"type":"links", "credits_used":0, "status":200, "total":221, "checked":150,
# "counts":{"ok":144,"redirect":5,"broken":1}, "links":[...], "issues":[...]}More site checks: redirect checker, HTTP header checker, SSL checker, robots.txt checker and structured data checker. Pay-as-you-go screenshot and PDF API: €5 buys 2,000 renders and credits never expire. Get 25 free API renders a month
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