What does the broken internal links check look for?
It checks whether the internal links on (and across) your site lead to working pages. Specifically:
- 404 destinations — internal links pointing to URLs that no longer exist.
- Error responses — links resolving to error status codes rather than a healthy 200.
- Scale — whether broken links are isolated or widespread across the site.
No broken internal links passes; a few broken links is a warning; many broken internal links is a fail.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly follows internal links and checks their response status to find ones that 404. It's an extended Links & Authority check that runs partially, since verifying links requires fetching each destination.
Why broken internal links matter for SEO and GEO
Internal links are the connective tissue of your site — they help users navigate, help crawlers discover pages, and pass authority between them. A broken internal link breaks all three. For users, it's a dead end and a frustrating 404 that erodes trust. For crawlers, it wastes crawl budget: engines follow the link, hit an error, and that's effort spent on nothing instead of on your real content. And it interrupts the flow of authority, since a link to a missing page passes signal nowhere. Broken links accumulate naturally as sites evolve — pages get deleted, URLs change, typos creep in — so they need periodic attention rather than a one-time fix. The remedy is straightforward: find them with a crawl, then either update the link to the correct URL, redirect the old destination if the content moved, or remove the link if the target is genuinely gone. Keeping internal links healthy preserves crawl efficiency and the integrity of your link graph. For GEO, the same logic applies — engines that hit dead links waste effort that could go to citable content.