Broken links in a Next.js app are rarely just dead hrefs. They often show up as stale route segments, client transitions that fail after hydration, or pages that still return 200 while the actual experience is broken. That means the checking method has to be route-aware, not only HTML-aware.
Worked example from the current Next.js product site
The active VeriFalcon frontend mixes public marketing routes with operational scan routes, which is exactly the kind of route split Next.js teams need to manage carefully.
For a Next.js app, that is the real broken-link job: manage the public route set, validate internal navigation, and catch the pages that degrade after the first render.
Current Next.js-Relevant Product Surfaces
What to check first
- navigation links in headers, footers, and primary entry pages
- links introduced by content migrations or route refactors
- client-side transitions that only fail after a click
- dynamic routes that depend on missing data or stale slugs
- results, search, and utility routes that should stay out of the index
Why Next.js needs more than a basic link checker
A Next.js app can pass a simple HTML link check and still fail for real users after hydration or data loading. That is why route validation needs to include browser behavior, not only the first document response.
The especially risky cases are mixed rendering setups where some routes are static, some are dynamic, and some only become meaningful after client-side navigation.
A practical workflow
Start with the public route set you actually want users and search engines to reach. Then crawl it like a user would: follow internal navigation, inspect broken pages separately from soft 404s, and check whether API-backed pages degrade after the first response.
That workflow catches more release-risk than only checking whether a raw href exists in the source.