What rotting links actually look like
Affiliate rot, content drift, the gap between crawls, and honest comparisons with the tools people already have. Written the way the product is run: specific, and quiet about what we have not built.
changedetection.io vs RotSweep
changedetection.io watches pages you named, including self-hosted and unlimited if you run it. RotSweep watches outbound URL lists for broken / redirected / content-drifted. We do not self-host. They are not substitutes.
Every external reference in your docs is a promise you can't keep alone
Documentation rot is usually not a 404. The vendor moved the guide, rewrote the endpoint, or left the URL up with different contents. Content drift is the feature that notices.
Screaming Frog is a crawl. RotSweep is the watchman between crawls.
A quarterly Screaming Frog crawl is a map. It is not a watchman. Outbound links rot in the gap, and most of that rot still returns 200.
Visualping watches a page you named. We watch the links you depend on.
Visualping and Distill watch a page you pointed at and tell you when it changed. RotSweep takes a list of outbound URLs and classifies each as healthy, redirected or content-drifted. Same HTTP fetch; different question.
Affiliate link rot is a revenue problem, not a hygiene ticket
A rotting affiliate URL is lost commission. The worst cases still return 200: the merchant 301'd your deep link to a category page, or the offer you ranked for was taken down and the page kept its URL. Broken-link checkers miss both.
The link still returns 200. The product is gone.
Everyone catches a 404. The links that cost you money still return 200: a 301 to the wrong place, or a page that kept its URL while dropping the thing you actually linked to. RotSweep names that third case content drift.
A broken-link checker answers "is it 200?"
Broken-link checkers are good at 404s. They are the wrong tool for a list of outbound URLs you earn from, cite, or send customers to, because the expensive failures still return 200.
How RotSweep fingerprints a page
Content drift is a pipeline, not a vibe: fetch, follow redirects, extract main text, strip volatile bits, fingerprint, compare. A price change is not an alert. A blip is not an incident.
Fourteen days, then the card is charged
Point RotSweep at the list you actually depend on. Deep Sweep includes content drift; Daily Sweep can add it for €6.
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