Every request for an address that does not exist is recorded: what was asked for, where the visitor came from, and how often it happens. Patterns raise an alert. Nothing about this is visible to you, which is the point.
Why a broken link is so hard to notice
Because the person who could fix it is the person least likely to encounter it.
You navigate your own site through your own menu, along a path you know works. A visitor arrives from somewhere else entirely: a search result, an email signature, a card, a casting profile, a link somebody posted two years ago. They land directly on an inner page, which is a route you almost never take through your own site.
And they do not tell you. Somebody who follows a link to your reel and finds nothing does not email you about it. They close the tab. The only signal that anything happened is a visitor you never hear from, which is indistinguishable from no visitor at all.
What gets recorded
The address requested, the referring page where there is one, and the frequency. The referrer is the useful field, because it separates two very different situations.
A missing address with no referrer is usually somebody mistyping, and it does not matter. A missing address with a referrer means a real link somewhere in the world points at a page that is not there, and that one is worth fixing, because somebody deliberately sent a person to you.
Frequency separates the one-off from the systematic. A single miss is noise. The same address failing forty times is a link on somebody else's site that will keep costing you visitors until it is dealt with.
What you can do
Mostly nothing, which is the intent. The one useful habit is that when you retire or rename a page, the old address keeps working, so links already out in the world do not stop resolving. That is covered in how your page URLs are built.
Related: canonical URLs, notification preferences and favicons from your initials. The wider picture is making your site easy to find.
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