Mortise 3 min read

Broken-link alerts without an SEO suite

You do not need Ahrefs or a desktop spider to hear when a working link newly returns 404. Mortise baselines a site you verify and alerts on regressions only.

If the job is "email me when a link that used to work now returns 404 or 410," you need a baseline and a quiet rule — not a full SEO platform. Mortise verifies a site you own, crawls it, stays silent on the first baseline, then alerts only after a previously working link fails twice as 404 or 410. Free: 1 site, 200 pages, manual check once per day, dashboard only, no card. Pro is $12/month or $79/year for more sites, a schedule, email, webhook, and CSV.

Why suites feel like the default

Ahrefs, Semrush, and desktop spiders all surface broken links inside a larger SEO product. That is useful when you already pay for rank tracking, backlinks, or a deep crawl suite. It is expensive and noisy when you only wanted "stop paging me about the same old 404s" and "tell me about new ones."

The noise problem is explained in why broken-link checkers keep reporting the same broken links. The free-plan split between one-off lists and ongoing alerts is in how to check a website for broken links for free.

What Mortise is for

  • Sites you can verify you control.
  • Post-migration or post-CMS watching, after the obvious breaks are fixed.
  • Agencies and freelancers who want new-break alerts without another SEO seat.

What it is not: a rank tracker, a backlink index, or a 300-point technical SEO audit. For a plain-English punch list of current defects (links plus redirects, SEO basics, SSL), use SiteCheck first — website inspection vs new-break alerts.

Side by side with "just use our SEO tool"

  • Question. Mortise: did a working link newly break? SEO suite: many questions, broken links among them.
  • Memory. Mortise: baseline so known breaks stay quiet. Many one-off crawlers: full list every run.
  • Price for this job alone. Mortise free or $12/mo Pro. SEO suites are typically priced for the whole platform; check their current plans if you need the rest of the suite anyway.
  • Ownership. Mortise requires verification. Public page-change tools do not crawl your hrefs — see website change monitoring vs broken-link monitoring.

When an SEO suite still wins

  • You already subscribe and the broken-link report is a free side effect.
  • You need backlink or ranking data in the same login.
  • You need desktop-scale crawls and exports beyond Mortise's page caps (free 200 pages; Pro 2,000 pages per the product limits).

A small path that stays cheap

  1. Run a SiteCheck free scan (25 pages) or your existing crawler. Fix what you will fix.
  2. Verify the site in Mortise and take the silent baseline.
  3. Stay on Mortise free for one site with a daily manual check, or Pro at $12/month when you want email/webhook and a schedule.

That is broken-link regression monitoring without renting an SEO suite for the privilege.