Check a site
Lost URL finder
Find the old pages of your site that now return a 404. We pull every page the Wayback Machine ever saved for your domain, check which ones are gone, and give you the list to redirect.
Free · No signup
How it works
Type your domain.
We read the Wayback Machine's index of pages it has saved from your site, drop images, scripts, feeds and duplicates, and check up to 150 old pages as they are today.
You get the ones that are gone, sent to the homepage or broken, with when each was last seen working, a link to the old copy, and a redirect map to fill in.
Why lost URLs cost you
Every page that ever existed on your site may still have links pointing at it: from other websites, old newsletters, social posts, bookmarks. When that page is deleted or renamed without a redirect, those links hit a 404. Visitors bounce, and search engines stop passing the value of those links to your site.
This happens most after a redesign, a move to a new CMS, a change of URL structure, or a cleanup of old blog posts and products. Teams usually redirect the pages they remember. The pages nobody remembers are the ones this lost URL finder is for.
How it works, and why it uses the Wayback Machine
Your own site can't tell you about pages it no longer has. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can: it has been saving copies of public web pages for decades and keeps an index of every address it captured. We ask that index for every HTML page it saved from your domain that answered normally at the time.
From that list we remove assets (images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, feeds), system paths and copies of the same page with tracking parameters, then check the ones the archive saw working longest ago first, because a page the archive stopped seeing is the likeliest to be gone. Each is requested as it is today, following redirects.
The results are the old URLs that now return 404 (not found) or 410 (gone), fail with a server error, don't load at all, or redirect to your homepage.
What to do with the list
- For each lost URL, find the live page that now covers the same topic, and add a 301 (permanent) redirect from the old address to it.
- If nothing on the site covers that topic any more, leave it as a 404 or 410. That's an honest answer, and Google handles it fine.
- Don't redirect everything to the homepage. Google often treats that as a soft 404, so the old page's links stop counting anyway, and visitors land somewhere that doesn't answer what they clicked for.
- Prioritise. Use the archive link to see what each page was. Old product pages, popular guides and anything you know earned links come first; test pages and old tag archives can wait.
Download the redirect map, fill in the new addresses, and test it with the bulk redirect checker before and after it goes live. Each old URL should reach the right page in a single 301.
What this tool can't see
The Wayback Machine doesn't save every page. Small sites, pages behind logins, pages blocked by robots.txt and very new pages may never have been captured, so some lost URLs won't appear here. It also only covers the domain you enter and its www version, not other subdomains.
We check up to 150 old pages per run, so on a big site this is a sample, not a full audit. For the rest, Search Console's Pages report lists 404s Google has found on your site, and your server logs show which missing addresses real visitors still request.
Some sites block automated checks with a firewall. Those addresses are counted as "blocked" and left out of the lost list, because we couldn't tell either way.
Questions people ask
Are 404 errors bad for SEO?
Not by themselves. Google expects pages to disappear. They cost you when the missing page had links or traffic, which is why redirecting the ones that mattered is worth it.
Should I use a 301 or a 302 redirect?
Use a 301 for pages that moved for good. A 302 says the move is temporary. Google will eventually treat a long-lived 302 like a 301, but a 301 says what you mean from the start.
Why did it find old URLs I've never seen?
The domain may have had a previous owner, or an older version of your site. Check the archived copy: if the old page has nothing to do with your business, you can leave it as a 404.
Why does a page show as lost when it works for me?
Your site may answer differently to automated requests, or the page may have just been fixed. Open it in a browser to confirm before you add a redirect.
Is this lost URL finder free?
Yes. No signup. A run can take up to a minute and a half, and results are kept for an hour.
Want it done for you?
Romeo redirects lost pages to the right place
He matches each lost URL to the closest live page on your site, sets up the redirects, and fixes internal links that still point at old addresses. Every change waits for your approval.
