<b>Deep dive: link health monitoring, the feature you'll wish you bought</b>

<b>Deep dive: link health monitoring, the feature you'll wish you bought</b>

Verdict: 8/10, the most underrated category in review tooling.

Nobody shops for a broken-link scanner. Then a brand changes its URL structure, 40 of your highest-earning links 404, and you lose a month of revenue before noticing.

What good link-health monitoring does:
— Crawls your affiliate links on a schedule, flags 404s, redirects, and out-of-stock product pages
— Some (Lasso, ThirstyAffiliates Pro) catch "product unavailable" states, not just dead links

Who needs it most:
— Sites with 200+ affiliate links across multiple networks, where manual checking is impossible
Who can skip it:
— Small sites with a dozen links you can eyeball monthly

Gotcha nobody mentions: most scanners check HTTP status, which returns 200 for an out-of-stock page that still loads. "200 OK" can still be a dead conversion. Only tools that parse page content catch silent revenue leaks.

What to test: point it at a known out-of-stock product and see if it flags it or reports a happy 200.

<b>Bottom line:</b> buy the boring monitoring tool before you need it, not after a brand breaks every link.