Broken link checker for docs and help centres
Docs rot when a heading moves and the old path stays linked from a guide. Mortise is a way to hear about that change without re-auditing every old 404.
No card required. 1 site and 200 pages on the free plan.
A crawl of public HTML
Point Mortise at the public docs root you control. It follows same-host HTML links, honors robots.txt, and stops at 200 pages on Free or 2000 on Pro. The source URL on a break is the page that still contains the bad link, which is usually the page you need to edit.
Versioned paths
A rename from /docs/v2/install to /docs/install is a normal new break if the old URL worked on the baseline and then returns 404 or 410 twice. Links that were already dead when you first crawled are listed as known once they fail twice, and they do not alert.
Mortise does not render a single-page app that only builds links in the browser. If the docs HTML that the server sends has no anchors, there is nothing to follow.
Keeping the signal small
Leave the historical 404s on the broken list and use New breaks for the regression. On Pro, a weekly schedule is often enough for a help centre that changes with releases. Email and webhook still wait for a confirmed new break.
Questions
Does it check links inside PDFs?
It can request a linked PDF and record that URL’s status. It does not open the PDF and extract links from inside the file.
What about anchors on the same page?
Fragments are stripped. Mortise checks the URL, not whether a #section exists on the page.
Can I monitor a docs site I do not control?
No. Verification has to succeed on that host before any crawl.