Broken link building — finding dead links on other sites and pitching your own content as a replacement — is one of the oldest link acquisition tactics still commonly recommended, and also one of the most commonly overstated in terms of current effectiveness. It works. It just works less often than it used to, and it's worth being honest about why before deciding how much effort to put into it.
Why response rates have declined
Two things changed since this tactic was at its most effective. First, outreach volume increased across the board — site owners who maintain resource pages get more "I noticed a broken link" emails than they used to, and generic versions of this pitch increasingly read as templated outreach rather than a genuine, personal heads-up. Second, more sites — especially larger ones — now run their own automated broken-link checkers, catching and fixing dead links before an external pitch ever arrives. Neither of these makes the tactic worthless, but both mean the realistic response rate today is lower than older case studies and guides suggest.
Where it still works
The sites where this tactic performs best share a profile: resource pages, curated link lists, or long-form reference content maintained by a small team or an individual, not a large publisher with dedicated technical maintenance. These site owners are less likely to have automated link-checking in place, and more likely to personally appreciate — and act on — a specific, helpful notice about their own page. Government and educational (.gov/.edu) resource pages, niche community-maintained wikis, and personal blogs with aging "useful links" pages are consistently the best-performing targets.
Large publishers and sites with dedicated technical teams are poor targets — they either already catch broken links automatically or have a content update process that doesn't route through whoever might read an outreach inbox.
The replacement has to actually be comparable
The single most common way this tactic fails isn't a low response rate — it's proposing a replacement that isn't genuinely equivalent to what was originally linked. If the dead link pointed to a comprehensive guide on a topic, pitching a thin page or a tangentially related part of your site gets rejected immediately, and a site owner who feels the pitch wasted their time is less likely to respond to future outreach from the same sender, even for a genuinely better match later. Before pitching, honestly assess whether your page is a comparable or better resource than what was there — if it isn't, either improve the page first or don't send the pitch.
What improves response rates
Generic "I noticed your page has some broken links" messages perform worse than pitches that name the specific broken link and its exact location on the page. Doing that legwork signals the outreach is genuine rather than templated, and it removes friction for the recipient — they don't have to go find the broken link themselves before deciding whether to act. This takes more time per pitch, which is part of why the tactic doesn't scale well: quality outreach at volume requires more manual research per email than most other link acquisition methods.
Treat it as supplementary, not a primary strategy
Given declining response rates and the manual research required per pitch, broken link building is better suited as a supplementary tactic — something to layer onto a broader link acquisition plan — than as the primary strategy. It doesn't scale the way digital PR campaigns built around original data can, and it depends on external factors (other sites having broken links you happen to have a good replacement for) that you don't control. Worth doing when the right opportunity appears, not worth building a link building program primarily around.
