Broken links create two separate problems: a poor user experience (a dead end for anyone who clicks) and wasted crawl budget and link equity, since search engines spend resources following links that lead nowhere and any authority those links were meant to pass simply evaporates. Internal broken links are usually the higher priority to fix, since they're fully within a site owner's control and often the result of a page being deleted, renamed, or moved without a redirect being set up. The fix depends on the cause: a 301 redirect to the closest replacement content if the page moved permanently, an update to the link itself if the destination changed, or removal of the link if no reasonable replacement exists. Auditing at scale requires crawling a site's full internal link graph rather than manually clicking through pages.
Example
A site migration leaves 340 internal links pointing to old URL paths; a broken-link audit catches them before Google recrawls and starts treating them as genuine 404s.
Related terms
Related Reading
404 Error
A 404 error is the standard HTTP status code returned when a requested page doesn't exist on the server — the classic 'page not found' response.
A/B Testing (SEO)
A/B testing in SEO is the practice of showing two versions of a page element — usually a title tag, meta description, or on-page element — to see which one earns a better click-through rate or ranking outcome.
AI Citation
An AI citation happens when an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini references or links to a specific page as the source for part of its answer.
