Doesn't match my experience. Yes, in theory you would expect everyone to check their links. In practice even my non-tech mother knows what a 404 error is. My

Doesn't match my experience. Yes, in theory you would expect everyone to check their links. In practice even my non-tech mother knows what a 404 error is. My initial target audience are web agencies, that either operate in a ship-ASAP-and-fix-problems-later way, or otherwise allow their non-technical people to create pages and upload images. Mistakes happen often, links break, and might stay broken for months before someone notices. I haven't worked with Fortune 500 companies, so I don't know how they operate at that level, but pretty much no small/med company, including web agencies, has an automated stack of headless browsers checking for dead links. For most people, dead link testing is done once in a blue moon through the abysmal interface of Google Analytics. EDIT: you added the paragraph about parsing HTTP responses after I have answered, so I wonder if we're talking past each other. This is not a simple bash script exactly BECAUSE the web is full of inconsistencies and broken servers, I am well aware of it. My bet is that someone wants to pay me to deal with all that nonsense, instead of using... I'm not even sure what is the state-of-the-art FOSS links checker. I wrote Bernard because I found none that was good enough.