How to Check and Fix Links from AI Answers That Won’t Open

You click a link in an AI answer and see “Page not found.” This often happens after a site move or after pages are merged.

This article explains how to tell the causes apart and how to fix each one. It is for people who update their company’s website, and it assumes the settings themselves will be changed by the site administrator.

What Is Happening When an AI Citation Link Won’t Open

When a link in an AI answer won’t open, the cause usually falls into one of three groups: the page moved, the page was deleted, or the server could not respond for a while. The fix depends on the cause, so identify it first.

There is one more case: an AI may invent a URL that does not exist. Ahrefs reported that 3.6% of AI-referred visits to its site landed on such nonexistent pages.[1]

Cause	Example (fictional URL)	Direction of the fix
Move	/guide/old-size moved to /guide/size	Permanently redirect to the new URL
Deletion	A page for an ended campaign	Say the page is gone and add related guidance
Temporary outage	Server not responding during maintenance	Fix the outage; do not redirect
Nonexistent URL	A URL invented by AI	Redirect to a relevant page if visits are frequent

The URLs in the table are for illustration. On your site, replace them with URLs that actually failed to open. For where AI visits land, see Where Do AI Visitors Land? Choosing Pages to Improve from the Ahrefs Case.

Separate the Causes Using Visit Records and Response Codes

Identify the cause from the URL that failed and the response code the site returned at the time. A response code (HTTP status code) is the three-digit number a site returns when a page is requested.

Collect the following items from your access records or from the site administrator. If an item is unavailable, write “Unknown” rather than guessing.

• Visit date and time
• Referrer (the record of where the visit came from)
• The URL requested
• The response code returned

Response code	Meaning	What to check next
200	Success	Whether the needed content appears
301 or 308	Permanent move	Whether the final page is appropriate
302 or 307	Temporary redirect	Whether a temporary redirect is right
404 or 410	Page does not exist	Whether it moved or was deleted
500 or 503	Server-side error	Whether there are outage or maintenance records

The meanings are based on Google’s documentation.[2] The right-hand column contains checks we added for this review.

Even with a 200, Google may treat a page as a “soft 404” if the body is empty or shows only an error message.[2] Do not stop at the code; open the page and check the content.

A single recorded 503 tells you neither the cause nor when service returned. Ask the administrator whether maintenance or an outage happened at the same time.

Fixes for Moves, Deletions and Errors

Handle a move with a permanent redirect, a deletion with a notice that correctly says the page is gone, and an outage by fixing its cause.

For a move, Google recommends a permanent redirect when you do not plan to reverse it, returning a server-side 301 or 308 where possible.[3] Redirect to a page that answers the same question as the original. Sending everything to the homepage makes visitors search again.

The setup method depends on your site’s system, and platforms such as Shopify and Blogger may have built-in redirect features.[3] Give the administrator three things: the old URL, the new URL and confirmation that the move is permanent.

For a deletion with no replacement, do not redirect to an unrelated page; return a 404 or similar to say the page is gone. Google gradually removes URLs that return a 404 or similar code from its index.[2] You can then add the reason for the ending and related guidance to the page-not-found screen.

For an outage, do not paper over a page with recorded 500 or 503 errors using a redirect. Google says URLs that keep returning server errors are also eventually dropped from its index.[2] To explain the situation on another page temporarily, use a temporary redirect such as 302.[3]

Avoid chains of redirects. Google’s crawlers (programs that read pages) generally follow no more than 10 redirects.[2] Set the redirect so the old URL reaches the new URL in one step.

Check the AI Links After Fixing

After fixing, record separately whether the old URL now reaches the intended content and whether the link in the AI answer has changed. Fixing your site does not tell you when AI answers will update.

Start with your site. Open the old URL and record the final URL shown, the content displayed and the date and time checked.

For Google, Search Console’s generative AI report shows impressions per page in AI Overviews and AI Mode.[4] Pages are grouped by their final URL after redirects, so check whether impressions continue on the destination URL.[5]

For ChatGPT, sites that block OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, in robots.txt are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links.[6] OpenAI says changes to robots.txt take about 24 hours to take effect.[6]

Enter the same question into ChatGPT or other services, and record the service, question, date and URL shown. Do not decide it is fixed from one result; check again on other days.

If the answer still shows the old URL but the redirect reaches the right content, visitors are not stuck. Treat that separately from whether the link in the answer itself has been updated.