A broken link checker that remembers your site
Paste-and-forget checkers list every dead URL and then forget the site. Mortise is for someone who will still be responsible for the site next month.
No card required. 1 site and 200 pages on the free plan.
What it checks
You add a public start URL and prove you control the host. Mortise then crawls same-host HTML pages, up to 200 per crawl on Free and 2000 on Pro. On those pages it records links, including external URLs, and classifies the response.
HTTP 404 and 410 can become broken. Timeouts, HTTP 429, and HTTP 5xx stay unavailable and do not alert. HTTP 401 and 403 are blocked, not broken. The crawler identifies itself as MortiseBot/1.0 and follows robots.txt.
What the first crawl is for
The first finished crawl is a baseline. Links that are already 404 are stored as known. That crawl does not send alerts. A later crawl can mark a link newly broken only after two consecutive 404 or 410 results, and only if the link was working or was not a known baseline break.
Limits worth knowing before you start
Free is 1 site, manual crawls at most once every 24 hours, dashboard only, and 14 days of new-break events. Pro is $12/month or $79/year: 10 sites, a daily or weekly schedule, email and webhook for new breaks, CSV export, and 180 days of those events.
Mortise does not log in, fix links, or replace a full SEO audit. www and the apex host share one site slot.
Questions
Is Mortise a one-off broken link scan?
You can run it once, but the product is built to keep the baseline and crawl again. The first crawl stays quiet. Value shows up on the crawls after that.
Which HTTP statuses count as broken?
Only 404 and 410, and only after two crawls in a row for a new break. Other failures are stored so a timeout does not page you.
How do I start?
Create a free account, add the homepage URL, verify ownership, and run the baseline crawl. No card required.