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Crawl Audit check 62Crawl AuditTechnical SEO

Broken external links: Crawl Audit check 62

Crawl Audit check 62 finds links to other websites that no longer work. What is known about their effect on search, and how to keep sources healthy.

Zain Kazmi2 min read
On this page
  1. What Crawl Audit checks
  2. What's known
  3. How to keep outbound links healthy
  4. On your platform
  5. Sources
Check
62 of 200
Module
Technical SEO & Indexability
Group
Link Hygiene & Internationalization
Impact
Medium

Short answer: pages on other websites move and disappear, so links you added months ago can stop working. Check 62 warns when links from your page to other sites return errors. We found no Google statement that broken outbound links affect ranking, so this is about readers: a source you cite that no longer loads makes your page harder to trust.

What Crawl Audit checks

  • In the full report: Crawl Audit requests the first 15 links to other websites on the audited page. One that returns an error code (400 or above) or no response counts as broken. Pass if none; warning if any, with up to five shown.
  • In the free check: not run. The result reads "not measured".

It's a warning, not a fail like check 61, because you don't control other people's sites.

Some sites refuse automated requests, so a link can be reported as broken and still open fine in a browser. Open each one yourself before changing it.

What's known

We looked for a Google statement that broken links to other websites affect your search performance, and didn't find one. What is documented is the value of sourcing: Google's guide to helpful content lists "clear sourcing" among the signs of a page people can trust (see check 30). A source that 404s doesn't support anything.

  • Link to stable pages: official documentation and the original study, rather than a news story about it.
  • Note when you checked it. Our explainers end with a Sources list that says "checked 3 October 2026", so a reader knows how fresh the link is.
  • When a link breaks: find where the content moved and update the link. If it's gone, link to an archived copy or a different source, or remove the claim if nothing supports it any more.
  • Check regularly: run the full audit, or a link checker, every few months on pages with many sources.

On your platform

The fix is the same everywhere: edit the link in the page or post where it's written. Nothing platform-specific is involved.

Sources

All 200 Crawl Audit checks

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Crawl Audit runs this check and 199 others on your domain. The full report is $7.89, one time. The free check on this site covers 25.

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