How RotSweep works
A sweep is simple to describe and hard to do well: fetch every link, follow it to wherever it really goes, read what’s there, and compare it with what you approved. Here is the whole story.
Every sweep asks three questions
Each check evaluates all three failure modes, in order. The first two are caught on every plan; content drift — the one nobody else does — comes with Deep Sweep and up, or as a €6 add-on to Daily Sweep.
Does it still load?
4xx, 5xx, a timeout, a DNS failure — the page is gone and the link is broken. Obvious, and table stakes.
→ 404 Not Found
Does it still land where it used to?
We follow every redirect to the end and compare the final destination — not the first hop — against your baseline. A deep link 301’d to a category page “works”, but it’s drifted.
→ 301 /docs/reference/webhooks
→ 200 OK destination changed
Does it still say what it said?
Same URL, same 200 — but the product was delisted, the section rewritten, the figure you cited removed. We fingerprint the meaningful part of the page and flag when it shifts against the baseline.
→ 200 OK
→ fingerprint changed offer removed
Tuned to stay quiet until it matters
A monitoring tool earns trust by what it doesn’t send. These rules are why a RotSweep alert means something.
Retry before flagging
A blip is not an incident. Failures are re-checked before anything is reported, so a flaky CDN or a momentary timeout never wakes anyone.
Fingerprint the content, not the HTML
Navigation, ads, timestamps and tracking tokens change constantly. The fingerprint covers the meaningful part of the page — the part you actually linked to.
Accept as baseline
When a site legitimately moves or rewrites a page, one click makes the new state the truth and the alert stops recurring.
Recoveries are reported too
When a broken link comes back, you hear about that as well — so you know a fix landed without re-checking by hand.
No email when nothing changed
A digest that arrives daily regardless trains you to ignore it. If a sweep finds nothing new, you hear nothing.
A polite crawler
Sweeps pace themselves per domain and identify themselves honestly, so monitoring a site never means hammering it.
The dashboard is optional. The email isn’t.
Most of our users never open the app. They read one email after each sweep and act on it — that’s the whole product for them, and we designed it that way on purpose.
It only arrives when something actually changed. It says which links broke, which moved and where they moved to, and which recovered — with the page on your site each one is linked from, so you know exactly what to go fix.
Calm, specific, and never alarming. It tells you what changed, when, and what to do.
Three steps, then it’s someone else’s problem
Get your links in
Paste them, import a CSV, or point RotSweep at a page and it pulls out every outbound link it finds. Sitemap scanning is on Deep Sweep and up.
We sweep on schedule
Every link gets fetched on your project’s schedule — daily to hourly depending on plan — and compared against the last state you accepted as correct.
You get one email
Only when something changed. It says which links broke, which moved, and where they moved to — so you can fix them without opening a dashboard at all.
See your first sweep within minutes
Fourteen days on Daily or Deep Sweep, card required, no sales call. Or start with the full feature list and pricing.
Start your free trial