Broken internal link: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
A link on the site points at a page that no longer exists.
Why it matters to a client
Broken links break the journey a visitor was already on — often on the way to booking or buying. They also waste the crawl budget search engines spend on the site.
How to find it
Crawl the site and look for internal links whose destination returns an error, or open the Links section of the AuditOpti issue list.
How to fix it
Update each link to the correct page, or remove it if the destination is genuinely gone. Where a page moved, add a single redirect from the old URL to the new one.
- 1In the SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math or SEOPress), open the page's SEO panel and correct the setting described above.
- 2If the problem repeats across a post type, change it once in the plugin's template settings rather than page by page.
- 3Clear any caching plugin afterwards, then re-check the live page in a private window.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as high severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a high-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.