Google Search Console: 404 Error
A 404 error means a page no longer exists at the URL Google tried to crawl. This usually happens when a page is deleted or its URL changes without a redirect in place.
Google will eventually drop the URL from its index after recrawling your site, once that happens, the error clears from Search Console automatically. In the meantime, you can mark it as fixed.
What happens if a 404 error is unresolved?
Leaving a 404 error unresolved has knock-on effects beyond Google Search Console. AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity also surface your pages in answers, and they cache specific URLs as citations. If those URLs return a 404, the citations become dead links in AI-generated responses. Most AI tools rebuild their knowledge daily from sources like your site's llms.txt file, so setting up a redirect means the correct URL gets picked up in the next rebuild.
If you receive a 404 error message for a URL:
Check if the page is supposed to be working. If you changed a page URL or deleted a page then the page will not work and you will get a 404. To fix this, you can set up a 301 redirect.
If the page is supposed to be working, please contact us for help and tell us the exact URL.