Fix the Broken Links AI Sends Your Buyers To

AI assistants sometimes compose an address from patterns instead of quoting a real one: a plausible path on your domain, often carrying the title of a real page. The result looks trustworthy in the answer and returns a 404 on your site. Because these links only exist inside AI answers, not on any website, conventional crawlers and SEO tools never discover them. URL Health finds them in the answers Ayzeo tracks for your prompts.

Only after two separate checks at least 15 minutes apart found it missing: HTTP 404, HTTP 410, or a soft 404, a page that answers 200 but behaves like a missing page. Timeouts, server errors such as HTTP 503, and firewall blocks show as Unreachable and are never counted as broken. Every broken-link count, on the page, in the digest, in reports and through MCP, uses that one rule.

No. It only requests pages to see whether they open. Possible fixes are suggestions for your team to verify; any redirect is set up by you in your CMS, CDN or web server. Checking a link never runs a prompt and never spends an AI query.

Add a permanent redirect (301) from the broken address to the right page, starting from the possible fix URL Health suggests. When several broken links share a pattern, one copyable wildcard rule covers all of them. Broken links are rechecked after every scan, so the row changes to a redirect as soon as the next check finishes, and the digest lists the fix if you switched fix notices on. The redirect keeps working every time an assistant repeats the invented address.

A soft 404 is a page that answers HTTP 200 but behaves like a missing page: it lands where made-up addresses on your site land, often the home page, while working pages in the same section open normally, or its title says the page was not found. URL Health verifies this against a working page on your site before counting it, and confirms it with two checks like every other broken link.

The digest summarizes the links currently broken in AI answers from the last 30 days, grouped by model, each with its status, the number of answers and prompts that showed it, when it was first and last seen, and the possible fix. Links that broke since the previous digest are marked New. It arrives weekly by default or after every full scan, goes to the project's owners and admins, and is skipped entirely when nothing is broken and nothing was fixed.

Yes. When your project is connected to Google Analytics, the digest shows the visits from AI assistants that landed on a link while it was broken, counted from the day it was confirmed broken. Visits from before the link broke are not counted, so the number reflects real readers who met an error page.

Blocked checks show as Unreachable, never as broken, and when a host keeps refusing, URL Health pauses checks on it and shows a banner. Ask your web team to allow the AyzeoLinkCheck user agent: the user agent string, the request rate and how the checker follows robots.txt are documented at ayzeo.com/bot. Once allowed, links get their status on the following checks.

URL Health is included in the Pro and Enterprise plans, and the 14-day Pro trial counts. There is nothing to set up: the first check starts after your next prompt scan, every project member can open the page, and owners and admins control the email digest in Project Settings.