Soft 404 Detector
Paste up to 500 URLs and the tool fetches each one and flags pages that return HTTP 200 but contain "not found" signals. Catches empty category pages, missing products, and search pages with zero results.
Technical SEO Intelligence
Soft 404s are the quiet killer of enterprise e-commerce crawl budget.
A soft 404 is a page returning HTTP 200 that shows user content like "no results" or "out of stock". Google eventually treats these as 404. but until it does, your crawl budget is wasted and your indexed URL count is inflated. Common causes: discontinued products returning 200, filter pages with no matching results, cleared user carts.
Input URLs
Next steps
Check the whole site, not one URL
SEORCE Technical Suite crawls every page and ranks technical issues by impact, so you fix what matters first.
Frequently asked questions
What is a soft 404?
A page that returns HTTP 200 OK but presents "not found" content. Google treats these as 404s but with the overhead of a successful fetch.
Why do soft 404s happen?
Common causes: category pages with no products, product pages for discontinued items, search result pages with no matches, framework defaults that serve "not found" via a 200 status.
Will Google de-index soft 404s automatically?
Yes, after Google detects the pattern. But soft 404s show up in Search Console as "Soft 404" errors you have to resolve.
How do I fix a soft 404?
Either return a true 404 or 410 status, or ensure the page has real content. For discontinued products, 301 to a relevant category.
What signals does this detector use?
Title + H1 + visible text patterns: "not found", "no products", "cannot be found", "page unavailable", plus unusually short body size.
Can I audit a sitemap in one shot?
Yes. Upload or paste a URL list. The tool fetches each via the Worker and flags soft-404 candidates.
Does the tool have false positives?
Occasionally: pages with the word "not found" in body text that are not 404s (e.g. a glossary entry). Review flagged results manually.
What is a 410 Gone response?
A stronger signal than 404: "this page existed but is permanently removed". Google de-indexes 410s faster.
Should empty category pages return 404?
A visibly-empty category that will be refilled is better 404'd or noindexed. A category with no products at all should 410.
How often should I audit for soft 404s?
After major content deletions, platform migrations, and quarterly as hygiene.
Do soft 404s affect ranking of other pages?
Not directly, but they waste crawl budget and signal site-wide quality issues to Google when common.
Free · no account
SEORCE for Chrome, Edge and Firefox
Audits the page you are on: headings, meta tags, schema, indexability, and whether AI crawlers can read it. Export the result as a PDF. Free, with no account.
It audits one page at a time and does not track AI answers. About the extension
Across the whole site
One check here. Every page in SEORCE.
This tool does one job. SEORCE Technical Suite crawls your whole site with fast and secure crawlers and ranks technical issues by impact. AutoFix applies fixes for meta tags, schema, canonical tags, image alt text, headings and internal links for orphan pages on your live site, through one script tag, and the list keeps growing.
3,000+ users · Free forever plan, no card needed