A broken link is a hyperlink that no longer resolves to a working page, usually because the destination was moved, renamed, or deleted without a redirect left behind. Clicking one lands a visitor on a 404 or a similar error instead of the content they expected.
For visitors, a broken link is a small but real trust hit, especially when it happens more than once on the same site. For search engines, broken links waste crawl budget on dead ends and can weaken the flow of authority through internal links, since a link pointing nowhere passes nothing forward. Sites accumulate them constantly and often without noticing: a vendor discontinues a product page, an old blog post gets deleted during a redesign, or an external site restructures its URLs. A periodic crawl with a link checker catches most of these before visitors do, and each one found is worth either fixing the destination, redirecting it to the closest live equivalent, or removing the link entirely rather than leaving it to rot.
