Introducing Link Integrity: Verify Every Link Before You Publish

Key takeaways

• The new Link Integrity Agent checks every link in a document across five areas: link relevance, domain decay, dead destinations, URL text mismatch, and anchor text mismatch.
• Broken and misleading links are one of the leading causes of content going stale, and they’re difficult to catch manually across a large site or knowledge base.
• The agent flags issues as comments with a high, medium, or low priority so you can fix the right things first.
• Run it on a draft before you publish, or on existing content to find links that have quietly broken over time.

I spend more time than I’d like finding dead links. I’m not looking for them. Usually a customer or a sales rep tells me one is broken, and by then it’s been broken for a while. Pages move. Domains get sold. A partner reorganizes their site and every link we ever pointed at them stops working. None of it shows up in a report. It just sits there, quietly costing us trust.

That’s the problem we built our newest agent to solve. Today we’re introducing Link Integrity, our latest addition to Markup AI’s Content Guardian Agents℠. It verifies every link in your content before you publish, and it finds the ones that broke after you did.

What does the Link Integrity Agent do?

The link integrity check verifies that every link in a piece of content works, points to the right destination, and is described accurately by the text around it. Markup AI’s Link Integrity agent checks five things: whether the link is relevant to the surrounding topic, whether the domain has decayed into a parked or spam page, whether the destination is dead or has moved, whether a visible URL matches its underlying hyperlink, and whether the anchor text accurately represents the source it points to.

Every broken link is a broken promise

When you link to something, you’re making a small promise to your reader: what you’re looking for is over here. When that promise doesn’t hold, the reader blames you, not the internet.

For marketing teams, that shows up in the numbers before it shows up anywhere else. Cross-linking and credible third-party references are how you keep people moving through your site. A dead link is an exit. A link that lands somewhere unexpected is worse, because now the reader is questioning whether anything else on the page is reliable.

For documentation teams, the cost is more direct. Someone is in your knowledge base because something is broken and they’re trying to fix it. If the article they need points them at a 404, they abandon the doc and open a ticket. Every broken cross-link in a knowledge base is a support cost waiting to happen.

The hard part has never been fixing these links, it’s finding them. There’s no simple way to know which pages reference the article you just retired, or which of your published posts point to a resource that stopped existing six months ago.

What Link Integrity checks

The agent looks at every link in a document across five areas.

Link relevance

Does the destination actually correlate to the topic being described in the surrounding text? This catches links that were pasted in error. It also catches links that made sense when the destination page covered one thing and stopped making sense when it was rewritten to cover another.

Domain decay

Does the URL land on a parked page, a spam page, or a domain sale listing? This happens constantly with third-party references. A company shuts down, sells its domain, or lets a registration lapse. A link you added in good faith now points somewhere you’d never send a reader.

Dead destinations and 404s

Does the URL land on a page that no longer exists? Sites handle hard and soft 404s differently. A soft 404 is especially easy to miss, the page returns a success response but the content is gone or has been redirected to something generic.

URL text mismatch

When a full URL is visible in the text, does the hyperlink underneath it go to that URL? If your copy reads https://markup.ai/pricing but the link points to a completely different domain, readers see one thing and land somewhere else. This is one of the most common copy-and-paste mistakes in published content.

Anchor text mismatch

Does the clickable text match the expected destination? If your sentence says “according to the analyst report we published this quarter” and the link points to a different research firm’s domain, something is wrong. It could be the text or it could be the URL, but either way the reader is being told something inaccurate before they even click.

What it looks like in the product

Here’s a quick walkthrough on how it works.

I open a sample customer-facing document and launch Markup AI. Link Integrity now appears under Accuracy Agents. I run a check, and within seconds the agent has scanned the document and surfaced the linking issues it found.

The first one is a relevance problem. The copy makes a specific claim — “over 80% of users prefer our features.” But the link points to a general blog article about content approval workflows with no mention of that data anywhere in it. The link doesn’t support the claim, so I added a comment to fix it.

The second is an anchor text mismatch. The sentence attributes a finding to one analyst firm’s report. But the URL points to a different firm’s domain entirely. Either I described it wrong or I linked the wrong report. Both are fixable in about a minute once I know.

The third is a dead link. We’re pointing at one of our own announcement posts and the page returns a 404. That page doesn’t exist anymore, and I need to find where it moved.

Three issues, one scan, no manual clicking through every URL in the document.

How it works

You can run Link Integrity two ways: select the agent directly, or run it as part of the Verify Links and Claims guided experience.

The agent identifies potential issues against the five criteria above and adds a comment to each link it flags, scored as high, medium, or low priority. That priority is what lets you triage — a dead link in a top-of-funnel landing page and a slightly off-topic reference in an internal doc don’t need the same urgency.

How to get started today

Link Integrity is live in your account right now. Open any document, launch Markup AI, and you’ll find it under Accuracy Agents. Run it on your next draft before you publish, then point it at the pages you rely on most — your highest-traffic posts, your most-viewed help articles, your pricing and product pages. Those are usually where the oldest links live.

If you’re not a customer yet, go to markup.ai and start your free trial. You can have your first link check running in minutes.