Broken links and the link checker

Pages move, campaigns end and certificates lapse, and a short link keeps pointing at the old address. We check where your links point and tell you when a destination stops working.

What you see

A link whose destination is broken gets a red Broken badge in your links list, with the reason next to it, for example "Page not found (404)" or "The domain does not resolve". The link's own page shows the same, with the date it started.

The workspace owner also gets an email listing the links that just broke. It is sent at most once a day per workspace, however many links break, so a site going down does not mean a flood of mail.

The link keeps redirecting as before. The badge is for you; visitors never see it.

When a link counts as broken

These count as broken: a domain that does not resolve, a site that refuses the connection, an HTTPS certificate problem, no answer within 10 seconds, "not found" (404), "gone" (410) and server errors (500 and up).

These do not: a page behind a login (401), a site that turns robots away (403 or 429) or shows a bot challenge, and other "not for this visitor" answers. The site is up in all of those.

One failed check is not enough. After a failure we check again 30 minutes later, and again 2 hours after that. A link is marked broken only after three failures in a row, so a short outage or a deploy on your side does not set it off.

When it clears

A single successful check clears the badge. Broken links are checked again every 6 hours, so once the page is back the badge goes by itself. Changing the link's destination clears it straight away, and the new destination is checked in the normal way.

Which links are checked

Active links in a workspace, on every plan. Disabled, expired and blocked links are skipped, and so are links made without an account. We check the link's main destination; the extra destinations of targeting rules and A/B rotation are not checked.

Links are checked in rotation, a batch every minute, and a destination shared by many links is checked once for all of them.

For site owners: UrlicerLinkCheck

If you found this page through your server logs, the visitor was our link checker. Someone made a short link on Urlicer that points to your site, and we were checking that the page still works. The user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; UrlicerLinkCheck/1.0; +https://urlicer.com/help/broken-links)

What it does, and nothing more:

• One ordinary GET request for the address in the link. It reads at most the first 16 KB of the answer and stops; it never downloads the whole page.
• It follows up to 5 redirects and gives up after 10 seconds.
• It sends no cookies, runs no scripts, fills in no forms and follows no links on the page.
• It makes no more than 4 requests to one site per minute, and an address it has checked is not checked again for a while.

If you would rather it did not visit, answer its user agent with a 403. We treat that as a working page, so the person who made the link is not told your page is broken. You can also contact us and we will stop checking your site.