Pathfinder Link Repair

No. Pathfinder Link Repair is designed for anyone who manages a WordPress site. The dashboard is straightforward — scan, review suggestions, click Fix. No coding required at any point.

Pathfinder uses a two-step process. First it searches your own site's content for pages that are semantically related to the broken link — using the anchor text, the broken URL's slug, and the surrounding paragraph as search signals. Then it sends those candidates to Claude Haiku (Anthropic's AI model) which ranks them by relevance and explains its reasoning. The result is a ranked list of replacement suggestions pulled entirely from your own site.

No. Pathfinder only suggests URLs from your own site's published content. It never invents URLs or suggests external replacements.

Pathfinder returns "No confident matches found on this site." This happens when the broken link's context is too generic or your site doesn't have relevant content to replace it with. In this case you can ignore the link, add it to your Allowlist if it's intentionally broken, or create new content that would be a good replacement.

No. All scanning and AI processing happens in the WordPress admin only and runs via background cron jobs. Nothing runs on your public-facing site pages. Your visitors will never experience any slowdown.

For most sites, weekly is sufficient. Active blogs and news sites benefit from daily scanning. You can configure automatic scheduled scans under Settings → Scan Settings so you never have to think about it.

The scanner flags these as broken:

• 404 — Page not found (most common)
• 410 — Page permanently gone
• 500 — Server error
• 503 — Service unavailable
• 0 — Connection timeout or DNS failure (completely unreachable URL) Links returning 200 (OK), 301 (redirect followed successfully), or 302 (temporary redirect followed successfully) are considered healthy and not flagged.

Yes. Go to Broken Links → Settings → Scan Settings and add URLs or domains to the exclusion lists. You can also use the Allowlist tab in the dashboard to permanently whitelist specific URLs or entire domains that should never be flagged.

The Allowlist is a permanent safe list of URLs and domains that the scanner will always skip. Use it for:

• URLs that intentionally return 404 (like API endpoints)
• External domains you know are temporarily down
• Partner sites you trust but that occasionally have server issues
• Any URL you never want the scanner to flag

Optionally, yes. In Settings → On Fix you can enable automatic 301 redirect creation. When enabled, every time you fix a broken link the plugin also creates a 301 redirect from the old broken URL to the new replacement URL. This is useful when other external sites might be linking to your broken URL.

The plugin does not automatically undo fixes, but every fix is recorded in the Fix Log with the original and replacement URLs. You can manually restore the original URL by editing the post directly in WordPress.

When you use Pathfinder, the broken link's context (anchor text, surrounding paragraph, and candidate replacement URLs from your site) is sent to the Anthropic API for processing. No visitor data, no personal information, and no sensitive content is transmitted. See the External services section above for full details.

The scanner extracts links from WordPress post content (the post_content field in the database). Links added via page builders that store content in the standard post content field (like Gutenberg, Classic Editor, and most block-based builders) are fully supported. Links stored in custom meta fields by some page builders (like Elementor's proprietary storage) may not be detected. Support for additional storage formats is planned for future versions.

For WordPress multisite networks, install the plugin on each subsite individually. Network-wide multisite activation is not currently supported but is planned for a future release.

For general questions and community support visit the WordPress.org support forum.