Outbound link checker

It fetches the page once, as a crawler would, and reads every <a href> in the HTML. Links whose domain differs from the page's own are outbound; links to the same domain (with or without www, or a subdomain of it) are counted as internal; mailto:, tel: and in-page # links are left out. Relative links are resolved against the page, and against its <base> tag if it has one.

For each outbound link you get the destination, the anchor text (or an image's alt text, for image links), and the rel attribute. Group by domain to see who the page sends readers to most; switch to every link to audit them one by one, and download the list as CSV for a spreadsheet.

A plain link counts as followed. Search engines may treat it as an endorsement of the page it points to. rel="nofollow" asks them not to, rel="sponsored" marks paid placements and affiliate links, and rel="ugc" marks links that users wrote, such as comments and forum posts. Google reads all three as hints.

What to look for in an audit: paid or affiliate links that are still followed, links to sites that have since expired or changed hands, and followed links in comment sections you don't moderate.

For a page open in your own browser, including one that only exists after logging in, open the developer tools console and run this. It lists every link to another host with its text and rel, and because it runs on the live page it also sees links that JavaScript added.

[...document.links]
  .filter((a) => a.hostname && a.hostname !== location.hostname)
  .map((a) => ({ url: a.href, text: a.innerText.trim(), rel: a.rel || "followed" }))

For a whole site rather than one page, a desktop crawler such as Screaming Frog lists outbound links across every page it crawls; the free version stops at 500 URLs.

A list of outbound links tells you what a page offers, not whether anyone takes it. If the question is "does anyone click the links to my other projects", that needs an event at the moment of the click. How to track outbound link clicks covers GA4, Google Tag Manager, Plausible, UTM tags and a cookieless beacon of your own, with setup steps for each.

And if the links you care about are the ones between your own apps, that is what Make Taksh is for: one script tag puts a small badge on each site that lists everything you have shipped, and counts how often it is seen, opened and clicked, per site, with no cookies. Why cross-linking your apps works.

What is an outbound link?
A link on your page that points to a different website. Links between pages of your own site are internal links; anything that takes the visitor to another domain is outbound, also called an external link.

How do I find all outbound links on a web page?
Paste the page's address into the checker above. It reads the page's HTML the way a crawler does and lists every link whose domain differs from the page's own, with its anchor text and rel attribute. To do it by hand, run the console snippet on this page in your browser's developer tools.

What is the difference between a followed and a nofollow link?
A followed link is a plain link, which search engines may treat as a recommendation of the page it points to. rel="nofollow" asks them not to, rel="sponsored" marks paid or affiliate links and rel="ugc" marks links in user content such as comments. Google treats all three as hints rather than strict rules.

Do outbound links hurt SEO?
Not by themselves. Linking to relevant, trustworthy sources is normal and useful to readers. The problems are links to spam or low-quality sites, paid links without rel="sponsored", and pages so crowded with links that none of them is useful.

How many outbound links per page is too many?
There is no fixed limit. Google dropped its old guidance of about 100 links per page long ago. Ask whether each link helps the reader; a long resource list can carry hundreds, while a short post with dozens of unrelated links reads as spam.

Why doesn't the checker find links I can see on the page?
It reads the HTML the server sends and does not run JavaScript, so links added by scripts after the page loads, common in single-page apps, are not in what it reads. If the page is behind a login, a bot check or a firewall, the checker sees what any other anonymous crawler would.

Does this tool track clicks on my outbound links?
No. It shows what a page links to, not what visitors do. Counting clicks needs something on the page at the moment of the click, such as GA4's enhanced measurement, a Tag Manager trigger or a small beacon; the guide to tracking outbound link clicks walks through each.