Technical and Link Integrity: Catching what breaks silently
Technical and link integrity monitoring catches the problems that don’t announce themselves: broken internal and external links, accessibility gaps, and technical SEO issues that quietly degrade a site’s performance and trustworthiness over time.
Cora IQ scans for these continuously and scores them using the same Lighthouse-based technical categories search engines and accessibility tools rely on — accessibility, SEO, best practices, and performance.
What breaks, and why it matters
Broken links come in two kinds: internal links that dead-end in a 404 or point to a page that no longer exists, and external links that quietly rot as other sites move or shut down pages of their own. Neither kind announces itself. Someone has to click a broken link, or a scan has to find it, before anyone knows it’s there.
That matters beyond user annoyance. Broken links and thin technical health are a negative signal for both traditional search crawlers and the AI systems now evaluating source reliability before citing or recommending a brand. These issues also compound: a handful of broken links today becomes a site-wide credibility problem if nothing catches them for months. Technical health and content hygiene are two sides of the same coin: one keeps a site structurally sound, the other keeps what’s actually on it accurate and consistent.
How Cora IQ scores technical health
Cora IQ’s technical score is built on three categories, drawn from the same standards Lighthouse uses to evaluate a page:
Accessibility. Whether the site is usable by people relying on assistive technology. This has become a compliance and trust factor, not just a nice-to-have.
SEO (technical). The crawlability and indexability fundamentals: metadata, structured markup, and mobile-friendliness. This is separate from content quality, which the AI content score covers instead.
Best practices. General technical health signals, including security and adherence to modern web standards.
Performance (page load speed) isn’t factored into this score. It fluctuates with hosting, traffic, and other conditions outside a page’s content, so it’s not a reliable, consistent signal to build a content-quality score on.
These categories are directional, not a precise formula. They’re meant to show where a page is technically strong and where it needs attention, not to reproduce Lighthouse’s exact scoring math. Together with the AI content score, this technical score forms half of each page’s Cora Score.
From detection to fix
Cora IQ checks link and technical health on a recurring basis, so new breaks get caught close to when they happen rather than months later during a manual audit.
When a scan finds an issue, whether it’s a broken link, an accessibility gap, or a technical SEO problem, it becomes a tracked, assignable task rather than a line in a static report that goes stale the moment it’s exported.
What is link integrity monitoring?
Link integrity monitoring is the ongoing practice of checking a website for broken internal and external links, so dead ends get caught and fixed before they affect users, search rankings, or AI systems evaluating the site as a source.
How does Cora IQ's technical score relate to Lighthouse?
Cora IQ’s technical score is built on the same categories Lighthouse uses to evaluate a page: accessibility, SEO, and best practices. (Page load performance isn’t included, since it fluctuates with hosting and traffic conditions outside a page’s content.) That keeps the technical side of a Cora Score grounded in an independent, widely recognized standard rather than a proprietary metric.
How often are broken links checked?
Cora IQ checks link and technical health on a recurring basis rather than as a one-time audit, so new issues get caught close to when they happen.
Does fixing broken links actually improve SEO?
Yes. Broken links are a negative signal to both search engine crawlers and AI systems evaluating a site’s reliability. Fixing them supports crawlability, user trust, and a site’s standing as a dependable source for both traditional search and AI answer engines.
Stop finding out about broken links from customers
Cora IQ checks link and technical health continuously, and turns anything it finds into a task your team can track to done.