Question 1

What does the Broken Link Checker do?

Accepted Answer

Paste HTML and the tool extracts every <a> tag, classifies the href (internal, external, anchor, mailto, tel, javascript, empty, or relative-without-base), detects common issues, and produces a link report with stats. It does NOT make HTTP requests to verify the links resolve — for that, use a server-side checker.

Question 2

What issues does it detect?

Accepted Answer

Empty href (error), javascript: URLs (warning — not crawlable), anchor-only links like #section (warning — no link equity), external URLs without explicit protocol (error), URLs containing whitespace (error), and relative URLs when no base URL is provided (warning).

Question 3

Why do I need to provide a base URL?

Accepted Answer

When your HTML uses relative URLs like /about or ../page.html, the tool needs a base URL to resolve them and determine whether they're internal or external. Without a base, relative URLs are flagged as 'relative-no-base'.

Question 4

Does it check if links actually work (return 200)?

Accepted Answer

No. Making HTTP requests from a browser is blocked by CORS for most sites and would violate the privacy-first principle. This tool checks for syntactic and structural issues — not HTTP-level breakage. Use it as a pre-flight scan before running a server-side crawler.

Question 5

What extra features does this tool have compared to others?

Accepted Answer

(1) Link extraction. (2) Internal vs external classification. (3) Issue detection (empty, JS, anchor-only, missing protocol, malformed). (4) Link count stats. (5) CSV export. (6) Plain-text report copy. (7) History (localStorage, last 20). (8) Shareable URL. (9) Anchor text per link. (10) Rel attribute + target blank extraction. (11) Top external domains list.

Question 6

Is my data sent anywhere?

Accepted Answer

No. All HTML parsing runs locally. History is stored in localStorage on this device only.

Broken Link Checker

How to use