How To Find Broken Backlinks In Semrush Fast

Why This Actually Costs You Something

A broken backlink isn’t cosmetic. It’s a link pointing at nothing, and whatever authority it was passing just stops moving.

In my testing across client projects, this shows up most often after a site redesign or a category restructure — someone merges old blog posts, deletes a product page, or changes a URL slug, and nobody thinks to check who’s still linking to the old one. Six months later, referring domain counts have quietly dropped and nobody knows why.

Method 1: The Backlinks Tool (Fastest Check)

This is the quickest way to get a snapshot of broken links pointing at your domain.

1. Open the Backlinks tool and enter your domain.
2. Go to the Indexed Pages report.
3. Check the Broken Pages filter — this isolates pages returning 4xx or 5xx status codes.
4. Click the backlink count next to any broken URL to open the Individual URL Backlinks report and see exactly which sites are still linking to it.
5. Filter by Active to exclude already-lost links, then export.

Pro Observation: a lot of people stop at step 3 and never click into the individual URL report. That’s where the actual value is — you need the list of referring domains before you can do anything about the broken link, not just know it exists.

Method 2: Backlink Audit (Better for Ongoing Monitoring)

The Backlinks tool gives you a snapshot. Backlink Audit gives you a trend.

1. Create a project and connect your domain to Backlink Audit.
2. Once the audit completes, open the Backlinks Overview tab.
3. Filter by “Lost” backlinks, then cross-check the target URL column for 404 status.
4. Sort by Authority Score of the referring domain to prioritize.

When I audited client sites this way, the pattern was almost always the same — a handful of high-Authority-Score domains buried in a much longer list of low-value ones. Fixing the top 10% by Authority Score usually recovered most of the practical value.

What Counts as “Broken” Here

Not every flagged URL is worth chasing. Quick clarification since this trips people up:

• 4xx codes (like 404) mean the page itself is gone — this is what you’re hunting for
• 5xx codes mean a server issue, sometimes temporary — worth a recheck before assuming it’s permanent
• 3xx codes mean a redirect is in place — not broken, though a redirect chain can still leak some equity

Fixing What You Find

• 301 redirect the dead page to the closest relevant live page, not just your homepage
• Recreate the page if it had strong backlink value and nothing else fits as a redirect target
• Email the referring site if the link is old and there’s no good redirect target — ask them to update it directly

Across multiple projects, redirecting high-Authority-Score broken backlinks to relevant live pages has consistently helped recover a meaningful share of that lost equity within a few weeks of Google recrawling.

Where This Falls Short

Semrush’s backlink index is large, but it isn’t instant. There’s usually some lag between a link actually going dead and Semrush’s crawler reflecting that status in your report. If you’re dealing with a handful of high-priority links and need real-time confirmation, a quick manual check alongside Semrush is worth the extra five minutes.

Pricing Snapshot

Backlink Audit and the Backlinks tool are both included starting from the SEO Toolkit Pro plan at $139.95/mo (or $117.33/mo billed annually), which also covers Site Audit, Position Tracking, and keyword research tools. If you’re deciding between tiers based on how much backlink monitoring you actually need, it’s worth comparing against Semrush Pro vs Guru — Guru adds historical data, which matters if you want to track backlink trends over time rather than just current snapshots.

Semrush also offers a 7-day free trial, which is enough time to run a full Backlink Audit and get a real read on how many broken backlinks your site is currently carrying.