URL · BROKEN LINKS · SITEMAP

Link Checker

Verify that links are reachable, spot broken links, and validate URLs pulled from websites or sitemaps.

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Test a single URL, a list of URLs, or crawl an entire sitemap.

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What is a link checker and why broken links hurt your site

A link checker sends an HTTP request to a URL and reads the response code the server returns. A 200 means the page is reachable. A 404 means it is gone. A 500 means the server failed. This tool does that work automatically, so you do not have to click through hundreds of links by hand.

Broken links damage both user experience and crawl efficiency. Search engine bots follow links to discover content. When they hit dead ends repeatedly, they spend crawl budget on errors instead of indexing live pages. Fixing dead links is one of the most direct ways to keep a site healthy.

How the link status checker works

When you submit a URL, the tool makes an outbound HTTP request from the pingie.net server to the target address. It follows any redirects automatically and records the final destination URL along with the total redirect count. The result includes the HTTP status code, status text, response time in milliseconds, content type, and SSL certificate information.

For SSL, if the initial request fails certificate verification, the tool retries with verification disabled and flags that condition in the result. This tells you whether a site has a certificate problem rather than simply reporting it as unreachable.

Because requests originate from the pingie.net server, some sites that block datacenter IP ranges may return a different status than a browser would. That is worth keeping in mind when a result looks unexpected.

Four ways to use this URL checker

The tool supports four distinct checking modes depending on how many URLs you need to test and where those URLs come from.

  1. Single URL check: Enter one URL and click Check. The tool returns the status code, final URL after redirects, response time, content type, and SSL details. You do not need to include https:// because it is added automatically if omitted.
  2. Batch check: Enter up to five URLs, one per line, then click Check All. Each URL is tested independently and results appear side by side, which is useful for spot-checking a small set of links quickly.
  3. Page extraction and check: Enter a page URL and choose the extract-and-check option. The tool fetches the page HTML, parses every href attribute, filters out anchors, mailto links, tel links, and javascript URIs, then checks each remaining link. Up to 100 links per page are tested concurrently.
  4. Sitemap extraction: The tool can fetch a site's /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml , extract up to 500 URLs listed there, and check every one. This is the most thorough option for auditing an entire domain in one pass.

When to run a link scan

There are several situations where running a url checker online saves significant manual effort.

  • Before and after a site migration or URL restructure, to confirm old URLs redirect correctly and no destinations return errors.
  • After publishing a new page with many outbound references, to verify every external source is still live.
  • During a regular SEO audit, to catch links that have gone dead since the last review.
  • When investigating a crawl coverage drop in Google Search Console, to find which URLs are returning error codes.
  • After a CMS update that may have changed permalink structures unexpectedly.

What the results tell you

Each checked URL returns a structured result. Here is what each field means in practice.

  • Status code and status text: The raw HTTP response, such as 200 OK, 301 Moved Permanently, or 404 Not Found.
  • Response time: How long the server took to respond, in milliseconds. High values may indicate a slow host rather than a broken link.
  • Final URL: The destination after all redirects are followed. Useful for spotting redirect chains that land somewhere unexpected.
  • Redirect count: The number of hops before reaching the final URL. Long redirect chains add latency and can confuse crawlers.
  • Content type: The MIME type returned, such as text/html or application/pdf . A URL that returns a PDF when you expect HTML is worth investigating.
  • SSL information: Certificate validity details, and a flag if verification had to be disabled to complete the request.

If you want to inspect the raw HTTP headers a server returns separately, the HTTP Headers Checker shows every response header in full.

How this link scanner online differs from browser extensions

Browser-based link checkers run requests from your own IP address and browser context. They can be affected by your location, cookies, and login state. This link scanner online runs from a neutral server, which means results reflect what an unauthenticated external visitor or crawler would see, not what you see while logged in.

The sitemap mode is also something most browser extensions do not support. Extracting up to 500 URLs from a sitemap and checking them in one session covers ground that would take a long time to replicate manually or with a browser plugin.

For DNS-level diagnostics alongside your link audit, the DNS Lookup tool can confirm whether a domain resolves correctly when a URL check returns a connection error.

FAQ

A broken link is a URL that does not return a successful HTTP response. Technically, this means the server returns a 4xx status code (such as 404 Not Found or 403 Forbidden) or a 5xx code (such as 500 Internal Server Error), or the connection times out entirely. Any of these outcomes means the resource at that address is not accessible to visitors or crawlers.

The batch mode accepts up to five URLs entered manually, one per line. The page extraction mode fetches a single page and checks up to 100 links found in its HTML. The sitemap mode extracts up to 500 URLs from a site's sitemap file and checks each one. These limits exist to keep response times reasonable and prevent individual sessions from overloading target servers.

A redirect returns a 3xx status code and points the client to a different URL. The tool follows the chain automatically and reports the final destination along with the redirect count. A broken link returns a 4xx or 5xx code, meaning no valid resource was found. Redirects are not inherently broken, but long chains or redirects that eventually land on a 404 are worth fixing because they waste crawl budget and add latency for visitors.

Requests are sent from the pingie.net server, not from your browser or IP address. Some websites block requests from datacenter IP ranges, rate-limit non-browser user agents, or require cookies or login sessions to serve content. When you load the same URL in a browser while logged in, you are sending a different request with different headers and authentication state. The tool result reflects what an unauthenticated external client, such as a search engine bot, would receive.

The tool reports certificate details for HTTPS URLs. If the initial request fails SSL verification (for example, because the certificate is expired, self-signed, or the hostname does not match), the tool retries with verification disabled and flags the result as having SSL verification disabled. This lets you distinguish between a site that is genuinely unreachable and one that is live but has a certificate problem that browsers would warn visitors about.

The tool fetches the page HTML and parses every href attribute it finds. It then filters out anything that is not a standard web URL: anchor links starting with # , mailto: addresses, tel: numbers, javascript: handlers, and data: URIs are all excluded. The remaining URLs are checked concurrently, up to a maximum of 100 per page. Links are not deduplicated before checking, so duplicates in the source HTML will appear as separate results.

A link checker focuses on whether a URL is reachable and summarizes key response fields: status code, redirect chain, response time, and SSL state. An HTTP headers checker returns every raw response header the server sends, such as cache-control directives, security headers, and server identification strings. Use the link checker for bulk accessibility audits and the headers checker when you need to inspect a specific server configuration in detail.

No. The page extraction mode parses HTML only. If a URL points to a PDF or other document, the tool will check whether that file is accessible (returning a 200 status) but it will not open the file and extract links from inside it. Only links found in HTML href attributes on a web page are extracted and tested.

The primary URL in a single or batch check has a 10-second timeout. Each link extracted from a page or sitemap has a 5-second timeout. If the server does not respond within those windows, the URL is marked as inaccessible. A timeout result means the host is either down, very slow, or actively blocking the request, and it is worth investigating further before concluding the link is permanently broken.

The sitemap mode extracts up to 500 URLs from a /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml file and checks each one. For sites with more than 500 pages, only the first 500 URLs listed in the sitemap will be tested in a single session. If your sitemap index references multiple child sitemaps, the tool reads from the index file and processes URLs up to the 500-URL limit across those child sitemaps.

URLs you submit are used only to perform the requested checks and are not stored for any purpose beyond processing your session. No results are retained after the session ends. For full details on how pingie.net handles data, see the privacy policy .

No. The tool sends unauthenticated HTTP requests. Pages that require a login, HTTP basic authentication, or session cookies will return a 401, 403, or redirect to a login page rather than the actual content. You can still check individual URLs if you know the direct addresses, but the page extraction mode will not be able to read the HTML of a protected page to find links within it.