Broken internal links: Crawl Audit check 61

Short answer: a broken internal link is a link on your site to a page on your site that doesn't exist any more, so the visitor gets a "not found" page. Check 61 fails when it finds any. Google says 404s on their own don't hurt your rankings, but a broken link you made yourself is still a dead end for a visitor, and a wasted trip for a crawler. Fix the ones you link to.

What Crawl Audit checks

• In the full report: Crawl Audit requests the first 25 links to your own site and the first 15 to other sites on the audited page. A link to your own domain that returns an error code (400 or above) or no response counts as broken. Pass if there are none; fail if there are any, with up to five shown.
• In the free check: this check isn't run. The result reads "not measured".

What Google says

• Search Console Help: "Many (most?) 404 errors are not worth fixing because 404s don't harm your site's indexing or ranking."
• Google's crawling documentation: "Google doesn't index URLs that return a 4xx status code, and URLs that are already indexed and return a 4xx status code are removed from the index."
• Search Console's page indexing help: "404 responses are not necessarily a problem, if the page has been removed without any replacement", and "we recommend fixing only 404 errors that you link to yourself or list in a sitemap."

That last line is the useful one. A page you deleted on purpose can stay a 404. A link on your own site pointing to it should be fixed.

We found exactly this on our own site. Our complete guide to AI search optimization linked to five of our own pages that returned 404. On 30 September we pointed each link at a live page, or removed it.

How to fix broken internal links

1. Find them: Crawl Audit's full report, Search Console's "Not found (404)" list, or any site crawler.
2. For each one, decide: update the link to the right page, remove it, or, if the page moved, add a permanent redirect from the old address (check 50).
3. Watch out for soft 404s: a page that says "not found" but returns 200. Search Console reports these as soft 404s and recommends "returning a 404 response code" for pages that are truly gone.

On your platform

• Shopify: URL redirects can only be created from URLs that are already broken, which is exactly this case: Content › Menus › View URL Redirects.
• Wix: the URL Redirect Manager under SEO & GEO › Tools and settings.
• Squarespace: URL mappings, for example /old-page -> /new-page 301.
• WordPress and Next.js: update the link where it's written, and add a redirect if the page moved.

Sources

• Google Search Console Help, 404 (Page not found) errors and Page indexing report, checked 3 October 2026.
• Google, HTTP status codes and network errors (updated 4 February 2026).
• Shopify, URL redirects; Wix, 301 redirects; Squarespace, URL mappings.