A link on my site doesn’t work
A dead link is a small betrayal - a visitor trusts it, clicks, and hits nothing. On a bernard-hosted site you fix it by describing the link, and the AI does the detective work.
The prompt
“There’s a broken link on my [page name] page - the one labelled [the link text]. Fix it so it points to [where it should go], or remove it if there’s nowhere right for it to point.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
How it works
- Connect bernard to your AI (once). Log in to bernard, open your site, go to Use your own AI, and paste the setup prompt into your AI to connect it - a one-time setup.
- Paste it into your AI - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you already use - then ask in your own words, or use the prompt below.
- Approve. The AI sends back a preview link. Click the repaired link on the preview, press Approve, and it’s live.
If you’re not sure where the link should point any more, say so - the AI can suggest the best destination from your own pages, or simply take the link out cleanly.
Old addresses that no longer work
Sometimes the broken link is not on your site at all. A YouTube description, an
old leaflet or another website still points at an address your site no longer
has - a short link like /freebie, or an address from your old platform such as
/Contact_Us.aspx or /news/display.aspx?id=85. Ask Bernard to redirect the old
address to the page where it should land. The redirect is permanent: visitors go
straight to the new page, and search engines move the old page’s standing in
search to it. Capital letters, a slash at the end and tracking tags added to the
address make no difference.
A redirect starts working when you approve the change, and the preview cannot show it - after you approve, type the old address into your browser to check it.
To see the redirects your site already has, or to remove or change one, see Remove or change a redirect.
If the dead thing isn’t a link but a signup form that swallows details silently - a common leftover after a move from WordPress - that’s its own fix; see My signup forms stopped working after the move.
Video links
You can also ask bernard to check YouTube or Vimeo links on a page. It checks each video once, even if the same link appears in both the phone and computer versions. The check does not add images or change your site.
A video provider can confirm that it has information about a video without confirming that every visitor can play it. If a check is blocked, limited or inconclusive, bernard should say so. Open the video in a browser to confirm playback before removing a link on that evidence alone.
To stop new broken links appearing when you rename or move pages, see don’t break links when changing pages.
Questions people ask
- How do I fix a broken link on my website?
- If your site is hosted with bernard, tell the AI you already use - ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini - which link is broken and where it should go. It repairs the link through bernard, and nothing goes live until you approve it on a preview page.
- Can the AI check my whole site for broken links?
- Yes - ask it to go through every page and check the links between them. It can fix links to pages that have moved and remove ones that point nowhere, and you’ll see each change listed before you approve.
- Why do links break in the first place?
- Usually because the page they point to was renamed or removed - on your own site or someone else’s. When you remove or rename a page on a bernard site, ask the AI to update anything that links to it at the same time.
- Why does the check list a link to an address that is not a real web address?
- Sometimes a move leaves behind a link whose address is not a web address at all - a page name with spaces typed where a link should be, such as http://highbury fields apartment/. No visitor can ever reach it, so the check lists it as broken. Tell the AI which of your pages it should open, and it repairs the link on the draft for you to approve.
- The check found lots of broken links but they are all the same one. What about the rest?
- A link in your footer or menu appears on every page, so one dead address can be most of the list. The check groups broken links by where they point and counts the pages each is on, so the repeated one is a single line and every other broken link is listed under it. To check one part of the site only, such as your blog, name that part when you ask.