How the link check works

1. Your pages. It reads your robots.txt (and stays out if it asks crawlers to) and your sitemap, then picks up to 100 pages spread across it, plus your home page. No sitemap: your home page and the pages it links to.

2. Your links. Every link on those pages. Affiliate links are recognised by network: Impact, CJ, Awin, Partnerize, Rakuten, ShareASale, Skimlinks, Sovrn Commerce, Amazon Associates and the eBay Partner Network.

3. The store pages. Each affiliate link names the store page it leads to. That page is fetched directly, never through your link, so no click is ever counted at a network. Up to 300 store pages per scan.

4. The verdict. 404 or 410: gone. A product address landing on the store's home page: taken down. The page's own product data (schema.org) saying out of stock or sold out: out of stock. A store that blocks automated visitors (403, 429, a challenge page) is reported as "wouldn't answer", never as broken.

5. The disclosures. On each page with affiliate links, the visible text (not scripts or hidden code) is read for a disclosure that says you earn from them, and where it sits: before or right next to the first link, further down, or only in the footer. It also looks for Amazon's required statement when the site has Amazon links, and for rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" on each affiliate link. Details.

What it never does: open an affiliate link, submit a form, run your scripts, or keep anything but the links it found and your email if you sign up for weekly checks. Its visits identify themselves as RevWarnCheck/1.0.