How to Fix Broken Links Fast With Ahrefs + Automation

Key Takeaways

• Broken links damage three critical areas simultaneously: user experience (visitors bounce on 404s), crawl efficiency (wasted crawl budget), and link equity (backlink authority evaporates), making them worth fixing at scale.

• Ahrefs offers three distinct tools for different purposes: the free checker for quick spot checks, Site Audit for recurring site-wide monitoring, and Site Explorer for backlink research and link reclamation opportunities.

• Site Audit requires enabling 'Check HTTP status of external links' in project settings to catch broken outbound links; by default it only checks internal links, causing you to miss broken citations and third-party resource links.

• Build a repeatable broken-link workflow instead of monthly scrambles: crawl → export as CSV → classify by priority → select fix type → generate change → human review → publish, which prevents manual cleanup waste.

• Run audits monthly for most sites, but increase frequency if you publish daily, link to many third-party resources, or manage multiple client sites; automate this task to prevent it from being forgotten.

• Not all broken-link flags are true breaks—temporary server errors, redirects, and bot-blocking create false positives—so always verify before making changes, especially when automating fixes into a pipeline.

Broken links are silent traffic killers. A visitor clicks a link on your blog, hits a dead page, and bounces. Google notices too, and over time it can drag down rankings for pages you worked hard to build. The good news? Finding these problems is easy once you know where to look, and fixing them doesn’t have to eat your whole week.

This guide walks you through using the Ahrefs broken link checker tools to spot dead links on your site and in your backlink profile. We’ll also show you how to turn that cleanup work into a repeatable system, instead of a one-time scramble every few months. If you run a small agency, manage content for a busy in-house team, or handle SEO for dozens of client sites, this workflow will save you hours.

What Is the Ahrefs Broken Link Checker, Really?

Ahrefs doesn’t have just one tool for broken links. It actually offers three different ways to find them, and knowing which one to use matters.

• Free Broken Link Checker: A quick tool for checking broken inbound and outbound links on a specific URL or site in seconds.
• Site Audit: A full site crawl that finds internal links pointing to 4XX pages and (optionally) broken external links across your entire domain.
• Site Explorer: A research tool for finding broken outbound links on any domain and broken backlinks pointing to your own site.

Each tool serves a different purpose. The free checker is great for a fast spot check. Site Audit is built for ongoing, site-wide monitoring. Site Explorer is your go-to for backlink research and link-reclamation projects. We’ll break down all three below.

Why Broken Links Matter More Than You Think

It’s tempting to treat broken links as a minor annoyance. But they quietly damage three things at once: user experience, crawl efficiency, and link equity.

1. User experience suffers. A visitor who hits a 404 page loses trust in your site and often leaves for good.
2. Search engines waste crawl budget. Every dead link is a wasted crawl request that could have gone toward a page you actually want indexed.
3. Link equity gets lost. If other sites link to a page that no longer exists, that valuable backlink authority just evaporates.

For teams managing dozens or hundreds of articles, these small leaks add up fast. This is exactly the kind of maintenance task that benefits from automation, which we’ll cover later in this article.

Step 1: Use the Free Ahrefs Broken Link Checker for Quick Wins

If you just want a fast answer, start here. The free Ahrefs Broken Link Checker is designed for checking broken inbound and outbound links for a site or single URL in seconds. Just type in a domain, and it returns a list of broken pages along with basic details.

This tool works well for:

• A quick check before a client call or internal report
• Spot-checking a competitor’s site during research
• Verifying that a link problem you already suspected is real

It’s not built for deep, recurring audits across a large site. For that, you’ll want Site Audit, which we cover next.

Step 2: Run a Full Site Audit for Site-Wide Monitoring

Site Audit is Ahrefs’ crawler, and it’s the right choice when you need to check every page on your site on a recurring basis. Once you verify ownership through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, you get free access to Site Audit with a monthly crawl limit (commonly cited at up to 5,000 crawled pages on the free tier, though you should confirm current limits in your account since terms can change).

How to Find Broken Internal Links in Site Audit

Site Audit groups broken link issues under a category typically labeled “Page has links to broken page.” Here’s the basic process:

1. Set up and verify your site in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or your paid Ahrefs account.
2. Start a new crawl of your site under Site Audit.
3. Once the crawl finishes, open the Issues report and look for broken internal link warnings.
4. Click into each issue to see the exact source page and the destination URL returning a 4XX status.
5. Export the full list as a CSV so you can assign fixes to your content team.

Ahrefs’ help documentation confirms that Site Audit results can be exported as a CSV file, which makes it easy to plug this data into a spreadsheet, project management tool, or an automated content pipeline.

How to Check Broken External Links During a Crawl

By default, Site Audit only checks internal links unless you tell it otherwise. To catch broken outbound links pointing to other websites, you need to enable one specific setting.

• Go to your Site Audit project settings.
• Find and enable “Check HTTP status of external links.”
• Run or re-run your crawl with this setting turned on.

If this setting stays off, Ahrefs will only check internal links, and you’ll miss broken citations, outdated resource links, and dead references to third-party sites. This matters a lot for content-heavy sites that link out to studies, tools, or partner resources.

Step 3: Use Site Explorer for Backlinks and Outbound Link Research

Site Explorer serves a different purpose than Site Audit. Instead of just crawling your own site, it lets you research broken links on any domain, including your competitors.

Two reports matter most here:

• Outgoing Links > Broken Links: Shows pages on a domain that contain broken external links.
• Backlinks report: Helps you find pages on your own domain that are broken but still have valuable backlinks pointing to them.

That second use case is powerful for link reclamation. If an old blog post on your site earned backlinks over the years and then got deleted or moved without a redirect, those backlinks are now pointing at a dead page. Finding and fixing these can recover real ranking value.

Comparing the Three Ahrefs Broken Link Tools

Tool	Best For	Scope	Cost
Free Broken Link Checker	Quick spot checks	Single URL or domain, surface-level	Free
Site Audit	Recurring site-wide monitoring	Full site crawl, internal + external links	Free (verified, limited) or paid plans
Site Explorer	Backlink and outbound link research	Any domain, including competitors	Paid plans

What the Data Actually Tells You

When Ahrefs flags a broken link, it reports three key pieces of information: the source page, the destination URL, and the HTTP status code. This is more useful than it sounds. Instead of manually hunting through your entire site, you get a direct list of exactly which article needs fixing and which link is causing the problem.

Common status codes you’ll see include:

• 404 Not Found: The page doesn’t exist anymore.
• 410 Gone: The page was intentionally removed.
• 5XX errors: Often temporary server issues, not necessarily permanent breaks.

This last point matters. Not every non-200 response means the link is truly broken. Temporary server errors, redirects, bot-blocking, and brief downtime can all create false positives. Always double-check before making changes, especially if you’re feeding this data into an automated fix workflow.

Turning Broken Link Data Into an Automated Content Workflow

Here’s where things get interesting for teams managing a lot of content. Ahrefs is fantastic at finding problems. But finding problems and fixing them at scale are two very different challenges, especially if you’re managing dozens of client sites or a blog with thousands of articles.

A smart broken-link workflow generally looks like this:

1. Crawl the site using Site Audit or pull backlink data from Site Explorer.
2. Export the broken-link records as a CSV for review.
3. Classify each broken URL by topic, intent, and content type.
4. Select a fix: correct a typo, update to a new URL, restore a missing page, or set up a 301 redirect.
5. Generate the proposed content change.
6. Route the fix for human review before anything goes live.

That last step is non-negotiable. Automated systems can suggest smart fixes, but a person should always sanity-check the final decision, especially when redirects are involved. Redirecting unrelated pages just to preserve link equity often creates confusing user experiences and can hurt SEO instead of helping it.

Common Ways to Fix a Broken Link

Once you’ve identified a broken link, you generally have a few options. Choosing the right one depends on why the link broke in the first place.

• Fix a simple typo in the URL
• Replace an outdated external citation with a current, authoritative source
• Update an internal link to point to the current canonical page
• Restore a genuinely valuable page that was deleted by mistake
• Set up a relevant 301 redirect to a closely related page

Avoid the temptation to redirect every broken link to your homepage “just in case.” This is a common mistake that confuses both users and search engines. A redirect should point somewhere genuinely relevant to the original content.

How Often Should You Run a Broken-Link Audit?

For most content teams, a monthly check is a solid baseline. Sites publishing daily content, or agencies managing several client blogs, benefit from more frequent checks since new pages and new external links are added constantly.

A few factors that should push you toward more frequent audits:

• You publish new content daily or several times a week
• Your site links out to a lot of third-party resources or studies
• You’ve recently gone through a site migration or URL restructuring
• You manage multiple client sites and need consistent reporting

This is exactly the kind of repetitive, easy-to-forget task that benefits from being built into a system rather than relying on someone remembering to run it. If you want to see how a fully automated content pipeline handles ongoing SEO maintenance, check out how SEO Rocket’s automation works from keyword research all the way to publishing.

Scaling Broken-Link Fixes Without Burning Out Your Team

If you’re a small agency juggling multiple client accounts, manually running Ahrefs reports for every site every month adds up fast. Multiply that by writing replacement content, updating links, and getting client sign-off, and you’ve lost an entire day of billable work.

This is where pairing Ahrefs’ detection strength with a content automation platform makes a real difference. Ahrefs tells you what’s broken. A platform like SEO Rocket can help generate the replacement content, manage your publishing calendar, and keep your sites consistently updated without someone manually rewriting articles every week. You can explore the full feature set to see how planning, writing, and publishing fit together in one system.

For content managers specifically, this matters because broken links often live inside otherwise high-performing articles. A five-year-old blog post might still be driving traffic, but if it links to three dead resources, its trustworthiness takes a hit. Rather than letting valuable content quietly decay, folding link maintenance into your regular content refresh cycle keeps your best pages performing well.

Quick Checklist Before You Start

1. Verify your site in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already.
2. Run an initial Site Audit crawl to get a baseline broken-link report.
3. Enable “Check HTTP status of external links” if you also want outbound link checks.
4. Export your findings as a CSV and organize by priority (high-traffic pages first).
5. Assign fixes to team members or route them into your content workflow.
6. Schedule recurring audits based on how often you publish new content.

Following the Search Quality Rater Guidelines is also worth reviewing, since Google’s own evaluators consider broken links and outdated references when judging page trustworthiness and quality.

Bringing It All Together

The Ahrefs broken link checker family of tools gives you everything you need to find dead links, whether they’re inside your own site or hiding in your backlink profile. The free checker handles quick spot checks. Site Audit is your workhorse for ongoing, site-wide monitoring. Site Explorer helps with deeper backlink and competitor research.

But finding the problem is only half the job. The real value comes from building a repeatable process: crawl, export, classify, fix, review, publish. Teams that skip the “system” part end up doing the same manual cleanup every few months, which wastes time that could go toward creating new content instead.

If you’d like more ideas on building efficient content workflows, read our blog for practical guides on SEO content automation. You can also check the product roadmap to see what’s coming next for automated content tools, or browse the changelog to track recent updates across the SEO automation space.

Ready to Automate Your Content Maintenance?

Fixing broken links is important, but it’s just one piece of keeping your content fresh, accurate, and ranking well. SEO Rocket handles the heavier lifting: keyword research, article generation, optimization, and daily publishing, all in one system. Instead of spending hours each month on manual audits and content updates, you get a steady stream of SEO-ready articles published automatically to your site.

See real examples of what automated content looks like in our writing examples section, or check out what other teams are saying in our customer reviews. When you’re ready to stop doing SEO maintenance manually, start for $99/month and let automation handle the daily grind while you focus on strategy.

FAQs

Q: How do I use Ahrefs to find broken internal links?

A: The easiest way is through Site Audit. Once your site is verified, run a crawl and open the Issues report to find warnings grouped under something like “Page has links to broken page.” You’ll see the exact source page and destination URL, so you know precisely what needs fixing.

Q: How do I check broken external links with Ahrefs?

A: By default, Site Audit only checks internal links, so you’ll need to turn on the setting called “Check HTTP status of external links” in your project settings. Once enabled, your next crawl will flag outbound links pointing to dead pages too.

Q: What’s the difference between Ahrefs Broken Link Checker, Site Audit, and Site Explorer?

A: Think of them as three tools for three jobs. The free Broken Link Checker is great for quick, one-off checks. Site Audit is built for full, recurring crawls of your own site. Site Explorer is best for researching backlinks and broken outbound links on any domain, including competitors.

Q: Can Ahrefs find broken backlinks pointing to my website?

A: Yes! Site Explorer’s backlink reports can show you pages on your own site that have earned backlinks but are now broken. This is a great way to spot valuable link equity you might be losing without realizing it.

Q: How often should I run a broken-link audit?

A: A monthly check works well for most sites, but if you’re publishing content daily or managing several client blogs, more frequent audits help you catch problems before they pile up. Building this into an automated content workflow means you’ll never have to remember to do it manually.