How this works
For an AI assistant it's a dead end: the path stops there, and whatever was meant to be behind that link never gets read.
Assistants find your pages by following links from the pages they already have. A broken link doesn't just lose one page. It loses everything that page linked to, if nothing else points there.
Why it matters
A single dead link in your main menu can cut off a whole branch of your site.
Broken links also build up on their own, without anyone doing anything wrong. You rename a service. You delete an old offer. You move your blog to a different address. Every link pointing at the old address silently becomes a dead end, and nothing warns you.
How to fix
1. Find them. Don't click through your site by hand, because you'll miss most of them. Two free sources will tell you:
- Google Search Console reports pages it couldn't open, under its page indexing report.
- Bing Webmaster Tools does the same for Bing.
Both are free and tied to your site rather than to any product. If you only set up one thing after reading this, set up Search Console.
Worth knowing what they cover: each reports what its own crawler ran into. Search Console tells you about Google, Bing Webmaster Tools about Bing. Neither sees what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Meta AI or Apple ran into on your site. Those assistants use their own crawlers and publish no such report.
2. Start with the links that matter most. Fix in this order: links in your main menu and footer, because they appear on every page; links on your homepage; links on your services or product pages. Links deep inside old blog posts can wait.
3. Fix each one properly. Three choices, in order of preference: point the link at the page that replaced the old one; point it somewhere genuinely relevant; or remove the link and leave the text. What you shouldn't do is send everything to your homepage. That's a dead end wearing a friendly face.
4. Redirect, if you moved pages yourself. If you renamed or moved pages, set up redirects from the old addresses to the new ones. That fixes every link pointing at the old address at once, including links from other people's sites, which you can't edit.
5. Check it again in a month. Broken links are not a one-time fix. Anything that changes your page addresses creates new ones.
Where to change this on your platform
WordPress
handled by a redirect plugin; several SEO plugins include one.
Shopify
URL redirects are built in, under your online store navigation settings.
Wix and Squarespace
both have a built-in URL redirect manager in their settings.
If the broken links aren't yours
Sometimes the dead link is on someone else's site pointing at yours: an old address from a directory listing or a partner's page. You can't edit their page, but you can set up a redirect on your side so the address still works. That's worth doing: those links bring both people and assistants.
