--- title: "Internal links return 4xx/5xx (or go through redirects) (seo/broken-links)" description: "seo/broken-links: Broken links waste crawl budget and dead-end users; ChatGPT and Claude crawlers spend about 34% of fetches on 404s." canonical: https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/broken-links lastModified: 2026-09-16 --- # Internal links return 4xx/5xx (or go through redirects) `seo/broken-links` · severity **warn** · category SEO · detected by `void seo` and `void audit` ## Why it matters Broken links waste crawl budget and dead-end users; ChatGPT and Claude crawlers spend about 34% of fetches on 404s. Broken nav/footer links repeat on every page (error). ## How to fix it Fix or remove the links, and link straight to final URLs instead of redirecting ones. ## References - https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/links-crawlable ## More seo rules `void seo` reports 60 rules in this category. What search engines need from the raw response: status codes, titles and descriptions in , self-referencing canonicals, one h1, crawlable links, Open Graph, icons, robots.txt and a sitemap with real dates. - `img-alt-missing` without an alt attribute — [seo/img-alt-missing](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/img-alt-missing) - `img-alt-quality` Alt text is a filename, a generic word, or overly long — [seo/img-alt-quality](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/img-alt-quality) - `links-not-crawlable` Navigation uses elements crawlers can't follow — [seo/links-not-crawlable](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/links-not-crawlable) - `link-text` Links with generic or empty text — [seo/link-text](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/link-text) - `trailing-slash` Both trailing-slash and non-slash URLs serve 200 — [seo/trailing-slash](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/trailing-slash) - `hreflang-invalid` hreflang uses invalid codes or relative URLs — [seo/hreflang-invalid](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/hreflang-invalid) - `hreflang-not-reciprocal` hreflang set isn't self-referencing and reciprocal — [seo/hreflang-not-reciprocal](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/hreflang-not-reciprocal) - `og-missing` Required Open Graph tags missing (og:title, og:type, og:image, og:url) — [seo/og-missing](https://void-design.vercel.app/rules/seo/og-missing) Detected by `void seo` and `void audit`. Explain it in a terminal: `void rules seo/broken-links`