AI is flooding the web with content. But who is keeping it clean?

The AI content explosion

The AI revolution is making content creation faster than ever. Companies are putting out blog posts at a scale that is hard to keep up with. If you still want to win at the SEO game, your marketing team is probably scrambling to pick up the pace, too. But with huge volume comes huge chaos, and that is something that companies are not yet talking about. If you aren’t careful, short-term gains might turn into the long-term destruction of your website’s health.

The problem: broken links everywhere

With thousands of pages on your website, it’s impossible to keep track manually. That blog post links to that landing page that was replaced and then forgotten. You know what it’s like. Or maybe it’s not even you: external references may move. A news article you are linking to can get deleted. A client that you link to from your testimonial page might go out of business. The result is that your website gets littered with 404s and visitors get annoyed. After a while, Google crawlers will notice the decline in performance, too.

The solution: broken link monitoring

The increase in content production makes it more crucial than ever to keep your website healthy. If you do not have a broken link monitoring system in place yet, now is the time to get one. You can either manually scan the website sporadically or get a tool that runs continuously in the background (like Semonto) and notifies you when a dead link is found. This way, you can fix the problem before the website visitor hits a 404.

“That’s not my job. It’s marketing”

The funny thing is that website maintenance is usually fragmented within a company: you have the technical team managing security and uptime, and a marketing team maintaining the content. This often leads to comments like: “Broken links? That’s not my department.” With the technical and marketing teams pointing at each other, broken links often stay unresolved because nobody owns the issue. And that undermines the reliability of the website, and thus the entire company. The good news is: you could be the exception.

How to manage web content in the age of AI

As AI accelerates content creation, a worldwide tidal wave of broken links is not far behind. Broken link monitoring will become a must-have for every company that wants to escape website degradation. In other words, it’s time to include website monitoring in your content workflow. Technical and creative teams will increasingly have to start working together to keep the website organised, secure and healthy. It’s the online way to avoid leaving behind a trail of broken links. And for this, you need a tool that is easy to work with.

Broken link monitoring with Semonto

So how to get started? You can use Semonto’s broken link monitor without downloading or installing anything. You start by entering the URL of the website you would like to monitor. Semonto will immediately start checking all the links. Afterwards, you receive a report with all the broken links. Semonto tells you where the link is located, and why it failed. This means that you can keep your website error-free. Because if anything goes wrong, you are the first to know about it.

Don’t forget about the images

Semonto also tells you if there are any images that are not being displayed correctly. These are called ‘broken images’. Semonto crawls your website and finds image URLs that result in an error code. These image URLs should link to the location where the browser can retrieve the image file. If this is broken, Semonto will tell you.

“I already use Google Search Console”

While Google Search Console is useful for seeing how your site shows up in search results, it won’t catch every broken link. That’s because Google flags missing pages, not incorrect links. For example, if you accidentally link to “/contct” instead of “/contact,” visitors will hit a 404 error. A tool like Semonto will detect and report that broken link, but Google Search Console won’t, since the page “/contct” never existed in the first place.

Get a free scan of your website

And while you are at it…why stop there? Broken links are just one of the many things that can ‘break’ on your website. Semonto watches them all: server problems, security issues, slow load times and more. All the results are collected in one easy dashboard that you can share with your team. Want to try all features for free? Create a free trial here. And feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We are a small but mighty team that responds to every email.