You've put serious work into your affiliate blog. You've researched products, written detailed reviews, carefully embedded your tracking links. The last thing you want is for those links to quietly stop working — taking your commissions with them.
The problem is that broken affiliate links are surprisingly easy to miss. Your site looks fine. Your traffic looks fine. But somewhere in those hundreds of links you've built up over months (or years), some of them have gone bad.
This guide walks through every practical way to find broken affiliate links — from the manual approaches that work for small sites to the automated method that actually scales.
Why Affiliate Links Break (A Quick Refresher)
Before jumping into the how, it helps to understand the why — because it affects how you look for the problem.
Affiliate links break for a few common reasons:
- Merchants change their URL structure — a site redesign moves product pages to new URLs
- Merchants leave affiliate programs — your tracking link becomes invalid overnight
- Products get discontinued — the specific URL you linked to returns a 404
- Affiliate networks change tracking formats — especially when merchants switch networks
The tricky part is that some broken affiliate links don't return a clean 404 error. They redirect to a homepage, or an "item not found" page that technically loads — but doesn't convert, and doesn't earn you credit. These are the sneakiest to catch manually.
Method 1: Manual Spot-Checking
Best for: Sites with fewer than 30 posts, or checking a single important page
The most straightforward approach: open your posts one by one, click every affiliate link, and verify it goes where it should.
For a small site, this is totally reasonable. For a site with 100+ posts and multiple links per post, it quickly becomes a multi-hour slog that most people don't finish — and then never repeat.
How to do it:
- Open each post in your browser
- Right-click each affiliate link and open in a new tab
- Confirm you land on the correct product page (not a 404, not a homepage, not a "product unavailable" message)
- Note any broken ones in a spreadsheet for fixing
The limitation: This only catches links that return obvious errors. If a link redirects to a homepage with a 200 status, you might not notice unless you know exactly where the link was supposed to go. It also gives you a point-in-time snapshot — links that work today may break tomorrow.
Method 2: Browser Extensions
Best for: A quick scan of a single page while you're already working on it
Several browser extensions (like Check My Links for Chrome) can highlight broken links on the page you're currently viewing. Green for working, red for broken.
This is handy for a quick health check on a page you're editing. It's not a site-wide solution — you'd need to run it on every page individually, and it has the same limitation as manual checking: it may miss links that redirect to a valid URL but no longer convert.
How to use it:
- Install a link checker extension
- Open any blog post
- Click the extension icon to scan the current page
- Review highlighted broken links
It's a useful tool in the moment, but it won't replace a systematic approach for a full site audit — let alone ongoing monitoring.
Method 3: Automated Monitoring (The Approach That Actually Scales)
Best for: Any site with more than a few dozen posts, and anyone who wants ongoing protection
This is where most affiliate bloggers should land once their site grows past the "I can check this manually" stage. Automated link monitoring tools scan your entire site on a schedule and alert you when links break — so you don't have to think about it.
Brokenly is built specifically for this. Here's how it works:
Step 1: Add Your Sitemap
When you connect your site to Brokenly, you give it your XML sitemap URL (typically yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). Brokenly reads the sitemap, discovers every page on your site, and queues them all for scanning. No need to enter URLs manually or install anything on your site.
Step 2: The First Scan
Brokenly crawls each page in your sitemap, finds all the outbound links, and identifies which ones are affiliate links. It then checks the status of each link — following redirects, checking HTTP response codes, verifying the final destination URL.
After the first scan, you get a dashboard showing:
- Total links monitored — every affiliate link across your entire site
- Health score — the percentage of links that are currently working
- Broken links — a list of every broken link with the page it appears on, the destination URL, the HTTP status code, and when it was last checked
- Redirected links — links that technically work but no longer go to the original destination (useful for catching links that redirect to a homepage instead of a product page)
Step 3: Set Up Alerts
Once scanning is set up, Brokenly monitors your links automatically. On the Blogger plan, checks run weekly. On the Pro plan, they run daily. When a link breaks, you get an email alert immediately — not at the next scheduled scan, but right when it's detected.
The alert tells you exactly which link broke and where on your site it lives, so you can go fix it without digging through dozens of posts.
Step 4: Fix Broken Links as They Come Up
When Brokenly alerts you to a broken link, you have a few options:
- Find the new URL — if the merchant changed their URL structure, search for the product on their site and update your link
- Find a replacement program — if the merchant left the affiliate program, check if they're available on another network, or find a competitor to promote instead
- Remove or update the recommendation — if the product is discontinued, update your post to reflect that and link to a current alternative
The key is catching it fast. A broken link that's been sitting for three months has cost you three months of commissions. A broken link you catch within a day costs you almost nothing.
How to Add Your Site to Brokenly (Step by Step)
Getting started takes about five minutes:
- Sign up at brokenly.com — there's a 14-day free trial, no credit card required to start
- Add your website — enter your site's domain and sitemap URL
- Wait for the first scan — Brokenly crawls your site and checks all your links (this usually takes a few minutes to a few hours depending on site size)
- Review your dashboard — see your full link health overview and any broken links found
- Set your alert preferences — configure email alerts so you're notified immediately when future links break
That's it. From this point, Brokenly runs in the background automatically. You'll only hear from it when something actually needs your attention.
What to Do When You Find a Broken Link
Whether you find broken links manually or through Brokenly, the fix is usually one of these:
Update the URL directly — find the product on the merchant's site and grab a fresh affiliate link. This is the best outcome: the product still exists, the program is still active, you just need the new URL.
Switch affiliate networks — if a merchant left one network but is available on another, sign up for that program and replace your links with new tracking URLs.
Find a comparable product — if the specific product is gone, find a similar one from the same or a competing brand. Update your review to reflect the new recommendation. Your readers still get a useful link, you still earn commission.
Remove the link — if no good replacement exists, remove the affiliate link and update the text so it doesn't send readers to a dead end. A page with no affiliate link is better than a page with a broken one.
The Takeaway
Finding broken affiliate links isn't complicated — it just requires a system. Manual checking works for small sites and one-time audits. Browser extensions help in the moment. But for ongoing protection on a site of any real size, automated monitoring is the only approach that scales.
The average affiliate blogger discovers they have far more broken links than they expected when they first do a proper audit. Don't wait until you notice your commissions dropping to find out.
Try Brokenly free for 14 days and get a full picture of your affiliate link health today.