Broken links the assistants send people to

Why it matters

When an assistant answers a buyer, it often links to the pages it read. If one of those pages no longer exists, the buyer clicks and lands on an error or on your homepage, and the assistant keeps relying on a page that says nothing.

What we check

When a check finishes, PollyX opens the pages of your own site that the assistants read, up to the 50 most used, once each, as PollyXBot (our reader, which follows your robots.txt). Each page gets a result:

• Broken: not found (including a page that says it was not found), sends visitors to your homepage, or a server error.
• Fine: it answered normally, or moved to another page that works.
• Not counted: it refused our reader, did not answer in time, or your robots.txt keeps our reader out.

The card names each broken page and how many answers it fed. A to-do item, Fix N broken links the assistants send people to, joins your list.

What to do

Fix each broken page, or redirect it to the page that replaced it. Then press the button on the card to open the pages again (up to 10 times a day), or wait for your next check. Broken links are exact, so Did it work? judges them at once.

A page that answers normally to us can still look different to a visitor; a broken one is broken for everyone.