How we check, and how to get a report removed

Get it removed

Every report page has a "take this report down" link at the bottom. One click, no account, no reply needed. It removes the page permanently and a later scan of the channel will not bring it back.

If you can't find the link, write to us and we'll do it.

What we read

Only what YouTube shows the public: your video descriptions and pinned comments, and the view counts on your videos. We never log in, never ask for access to a channel, and never see anything that isn't visible to any viewer.

How we decide a link is dead

We request it with a real browser signature and read what comes back. A link counts as dead only when we reached it and it answered with an error. Anything that blocked us, timed out or asked for a login is recorded as unknown and is excluded from every figure we publish — blocked is not broken.

About one flag in eight turns out to be a site blocking automated checks rather than a broken page. Every link we name is re-checked live, immediately before the report is written, and anything that has started working since the scan is dropped.

What the numbers are, and are not

We publish views, not dollars. The views on a report are counted from the videos carrying the dead link, weighted by the traffic each one is pulling now rather than its lifetime total — a ten-year-old video with a million lifetime views may be getting almost none today, and counting the lifetime figure overstated the damage by 16 times on the channel we tested it against.

We deliberately do not put our own dollar figure on a channel we haven't spoken to. We don't know what a click on your store is worth.

What we can't see

We check whether a link loads. A page that loads with your tracking code stripped, a partner program that has ended, an out-of-stock product, an expired promo code or a geo-blocked storefront all answer "OK" to us. Whatever a report says, the real number is probably worse — we just won't guess by how much.

If we got something wrong

Click the link on the report. That is the fastest audit there is, and it is why we put the URL at the top of the page instead of a score. If it works, tell us on the removal form — a link we called dead that isn't is the one kind of mistake this doesn't survive, and we want to know.