Broken Link Checker vs Check My Links: Which Chrome Extension?
Check My Links has been the default link-checking extension for SEO folks for over a decade — roughly 90,000 users and a 4.4-star rating on the Chrome Web Store. Broken Link Checker is our newer take on the same job. Both are free, both scan the page you're on, both highlight results in place. The differences are in what they call broken, how you work through the results, and a couple of features each has that the other doesn't. Here's the honest comparison.
The 30-second summary
- Pick Check My Links if you need to check links inside Google Docs and Sheets, want to exclude page sections (header, footer) from scans, or simply prefer the tool with a decade of history behind it.
- Pick Broken Link Checker if false positives annoy you (bot-blocked links get their own "blocked" category instead of being flagged broken), or you want a side panel with status codes, response times, filters, search, per-link "Locate", and one-click CSV export.
- Price is a tie: both are completely free, no accounts, no paid tiers.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Broken Link Checker | Check My Links |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Scans the current page | ✅ | ✅ |
| Highlights results on the page | ✅ + "Locate" jumps to each broken link | ✅ with customizable colors |
| Separates bot-blocked (403/429) from broken | ✅ dedicated "blocked" category | ❌ lumped into invalid results |
| Redirects reported separately | ✅ | ✅ |
| Status codes & response times per link | ✅ in a sortable side panel | ⚠️ codes in report, no response times |
| Filter / search results | ✅ | ❌ |
| CSV export | ✅ full report, or copy broken URLs only | ⚠️ downloadable report of broken items |
| Google Docs & Sheets link checking | ❌ | ✅ |
| Exclude page sections from scan | ❌ | ✅ (e.g. header/footer) |
| Links inside frames & widgets | ✅ | ⚠️ main document focus |
| Configurable timeout & parallel requests | ✅ | ❌ |
| Interface languages | 52, incl. RTL | English |
| Users / rating (CWS, Aug 2026) | new listing, published 2026 | ~90,000 users, 4.4★ |
Sources: both Chrome Web Store listings, as of August 26, 2026. If you spot something outdated, check the current listing — extensions ship updates faster than comparison pages do.
The big difference: what counts as "broken"
Run any naive checker on a links-heavy page and you'll see the same pattern: a scary red list where half the entries are LinkedIn, Cloudflare-protected sites, and anything with aggressive rate limiting. Those servers answer automated requests with 403 Forbidden or 429 Too Many Requests — while opening perfectly in a real browser tab. (The mechanics are in our guide to HTTP status codes for link checking.)
This is where the two extensions genuinely diverge. Broken Link Checker puts those links in a separate "blocked" category, so the red list contains only links that are actually dead: 404/410, server errors, timeouts, unreachable hosts. Check My Links reports warnings and invalid links, but doesn't draw this particular line — so on pages with many external links, you spend time spot-checking results that were never broken. If you've ever "fixed" a working link because a tool told you to, you know why we consider this the most important row in the table.
Where Check My Links wins
Credit where due — three things Check My Links does that Broken Link Checker doesn't:
- Google Docs and Sheets. Check My Links can extract and test links inside a Google Doc or spreadsheet. If your editorial workflow lives in Docs and you want to verify sources before publishing, this is the feature that decides it — we simply don't do it.
- Section exclusions. You can tell Check My Links to skip parts of the page — useful when you only care about links in the article body, not the site-wide navigation repeated on every page.
- Track record. A decade in the store, ~90,000 users, 4.4 stars, and open-source code on GitHub. A brand-new extension (ours) can't offer that history; you can only judge it by trying it.
Where Broken Link Checker wins
- Triage-friendly results. Instead of only coloring links on the page, results open in a side panel: problems sorted first, status code and response time on every row, filters and search for link-heavy pages, and a "Locate" button that scrolls to each broken link's position in the page.
- Fewer false alarms. The "blocked" category described above — every red result is a real problem you can act on.
- Exports built for handoff. One click gives you the full CSV, or copies just the broken URLs — ready for a ticket, a client email, or the repair workflow.
- Tunable scanning. Timeout and parallel-request settings, for slow servers or aggressive rate limiters.
- 52 interface languages including full right-to-left support.
What neither extension does
Both are page-level checkers: they test the links on the page you're currently viewing. Neither crawls your entire site on a schedule and emails you when something breaks. If that's what you need, you want a site crawler — we compare that category in Broken Link Checker vs Dr. Link Check, and the broader tool landscape in how to find broken links on any website.
Verdict
If your links live in Google Docs, install Check My Links — it covers a workflow we don't. For everything that happens in the browser — auditing landing pages, checking articles before publish, sweeping old posts for link rot — we think Broken Link Checker gives you cleaner results and a faster path from "found" to "fixed". Both are free, so the honest recommendation is: install both, run them on the same messy page, and keep the one whose report you trust more.