Broken links

How ScanGov finds, tracks, and helps you fix broken links across your site.

On this page

    Hello, this is Luke with ScanGov, and I'm going to show you how our broken link checker works.

    The broken link checker is a new feature in ScanGov. You can access it by logging in and visiting the domain that you want to check for broken links. You can see I have standards.scangov.org accessed, and I'm looking at the broken link checker for it. It looks like there are 28 confirmed links, and they're all linking to the same link that we've updated or removed. It also gives you the status, so it says these are broken.

    We break out the links into confirmed, likely, and needs review. We document the redirects, show any that you've dismissed, and provide a list of all of them.

    There are two ways to rescan a broken link. You can do it individually, so it rescans just that link, or you can scan the full site. You can see it says "link no longer found." Then you can scan the full site. Let's see, I'll run this now.

    You can also see that there is a download feature and a copy feature. The download feature allows you to download a CSV or a markdown file. I actually use the markdown file to run it through Claude Code to update these links. The copy feature allows you to copy the results, go over to a spreadsheet, and easily paste them in, and it will paste in all of the fields. You can use this with your team internally.

    So that is the broken link checker. You can learn more about it on scangov.com. Thank you.

    ScanGov checks every link found while scanning your site and flags the ones that fail, so you can find and fix dead links before your visitors do.

    Filtering the list

    Use the tabs at the top of the broken links page to narrow what you see: Confirmed, Likely, Needs review, Redirects, Dismissed, or All. Each tab's count reflects only what that tab shows.

    Every link gets a status badge showing what ScanGov found and how confident it is. Status explains what each badge means.

    Rescanning

    Click rescan on any link to re-verify it right away, instead of waiting for the next full site scan. ScanGov re-reads the page the link was found on and re-tests the link. If you fix or remove the link from the page, it drops off the list.

    Use the Rescan button at the top of the page to trigger a fresh scan of the whole site instead, which also refreshes every link on it.

    Downloading or copying the list

    Use the Download button to save the current tab's links as a .csv or .md file. Use Copy to copy the current tab's links to your clipboard, ready to paste into a spreadsheet.

    Dismiss a flagged link if it's a false positive, an intentional choice, or a third-party site's problem. You can record why. Dismissed links move to the Dismissed tab and stop counting toward your broken link total. Undismiss a link at any time to bring it back.

    Redirects

    A link that redirects to another address gets its own tab, alongside the address it redirects to, so you can review redirected links separately from links that fail outright.

    Features

    On this page