Run a one-time scan and you get a snapshot of Tuesday. By Thursday someone's redirect didn't fire, or a vendor pulled a doc page you'd linked to. TechySEO keeps crawling after that first pass. When a link dies, it shows up in your queue with the source page and anchor text already attached, not buried in a Search Console crawl report you check once a quarter.
Here's the mechanism, in case it's not obvious why a dead link matters beyond looking sloppy. Googlebot follows an internal href, hits a 404, and has nothing on the other end to pass authority to. That URL gets logged as an error in your crawl stats. It doesn't help indexing; it just sits there as wasted crawl activity.
Who gets hurt depends on the site. A discontinued product page on an online store means a lost sale. A dead citation in a publisher's five-year-old article quietly chips away at the page's credibility, even if nobody complains about it directly. And for agencies, there's one specific bad outcome: the client spots the 404 in their own analytics before you mention it in a report. That tends to be the moment retainers start getting reconsidered.
TechySEO's crawler revisits your site on a schedule instead of treating this as a once-a-quarter audit task. New 404s on frequently crawled pages usually surface within a few hours of showing up, each one tagged with its source page, anchor text, and HTTP response code. No separate tool. No pasting URLs into Screaming Frog after someone reports a problem.
A broken link isn't always an <a href> tag. Plenty of what breaks on a page never shows up in a quick visual scan.
Links get pulled out after JavaScript finishes running, not from the raw HTML response. So a link that React or Vue adds to the DOM after load gets caught the same as one sitting in a static template.
404, 410, a flat-out timeout, a 5xx from an overloaded server — all of it gets recorded as the real response code. One thing worth knowing: a timeout gets retried before it's marked broken. Cuts down on false alarms from servers that are just slow.
Source page, anchor text, response code, and a priority score tied to how much traffic or link equity that page carries. Enough context to triage without opening five other tabs.
High-priority 404s go to Slack or email as soon as they're found, not whenever the weekly digest goes out. Fix it, recheck the URL, done — the issue closes itself once the status code changes.
Someone pulls a discontinued product from inventory and deletes the page. No 301 set up. Do that across a seasonal catalog refresh and you've quietly got dozens of dead URLs sitting in category pages, old email campaigns, maybe a paid ad that's still running. TechySEO finds the dead URL and every page still linking to it.
This is where broken links spike worst. Redirect maps miss edge cases, slugs change format, an old category page just disappears. The first crawl after launch is usually where the missed redirects turn up — while there's still time to fix them before organic traffic notices anything changed.
There's one version of this that genuinely hurts: the client spots a broken link in their own analytics before you've said a word about it in your report. Continuous checks across client sites mean the fix is already queued, timestamped from the day it appeared, well before that email arrives.
Run the first scan in minutes and see your current 404s, dead external links, and broken resources before you decide whether you need this running continuously.
