Every site we audited had a broken link where buyers click.

The short answer

In every audit we pooled for our site audit findings, at least one link on a page buyers use did not do its job. Search work is spent getting people to a page. If the last click on that page fails, the visit is wasted, and no ranking report will show you why.

Six examples and their fixes

One more belongs here although it fails the other way. On one site, items that no longer existed showed "not found" to the visitor while returning a 200 status, which tells search engines the page is fine. Google calls this a soft 404 and recommends a 404 or 410 status for content that does not exist. The person understands it. The search engine is told the opposite.

What a crawler catches

A crawler would have caught three of the six. The other three needed a person.

• The three 404s were catchable. The upgrade link, the case studies link and the navigation link all returned an error. What a crawler does not tell you is that one of those was the only route from the pricing page to paying.
• The WhatsApp link was not. The link loads. WhatsApp's own instructions say the number must be a full number in international format, without zeroes, brackets or dashes. A crawler sees a page that responds and moves on.
• The banner was not. Nothing is broken in the code. A banner sits on top of a button at one screen width, and only someone tapping on a phone finds it.
• The mislabelled button was not. It works perfectly. It just does something different from what it says, and some visitors leave rather than find out what happens next.

What our own link checker got wrong

We ran a link check on getborvis.com on 3 October 2026, on every page except the four published with this one, and then checked its results by hand.

Six of the seven "broken" links were sites refusing automated requests with a 403. They included our own profile on a review platform and three help pages from a large AI company. A report that listed all seven as broken would have sent someone to fix five links that work. The checker was not even consistent with itself: two of the refusals let it through when we ran it again an hour later.

The one real failure was quiet. A Google help page we cited as a source had been removed, and now returns 404. Nobody told us. We replaced it with Google's current page on the same topic. Source links on a research page decay the same way buyer links do, and for the same reason: somebody else changed something.

The fix for both is the same. Treat a link checker's output as a list of things to look at, not a list of things that are broken.

Walk the path in twenty minutes

Do this on a phone, in a private window, on mobile data. That is closest to what a new visitor sees.

1. Start where buyers start. Search for your main service, open your own result, and go from there rather than from your homepage.
2. Click every button on the pages that sell. Pricing, each service page, contact and any signup or booking page. Note where each one lands.
3. Check the messaging and calling links. A WhatsApp link should be wa.me/ followed by the country code and number, digits only. Tap every phone number and email address too. If they are not tappable, a mobile visitor has to copy them by hand.
4. Check the proof links. Case studies, reviews and portfolio links from service pages are what a careful buyer clicks just before getting in touch.
5. Send yourself a real enquiry. Then confirm it arrived where someone actually reads it. In our audits we do not submit forms or make payments on a client's site, so this is the step only the owner can do.
6. Repeat after every change. Links on these pages break when something near them changes, so one check at launch is not enough.

Limits

• The examples come from a small set of audits chosen by who we worked with. They show that this happens on real sites, not how often.
• We did not submit forms, make payments or send messages on any audited site, so we cannot say whether enquiries were being lost. We can only say the path to sending one was broken.
• For the free audits we do not know what was fixed afterwards.