Redirects Are the Easy Part. Cleaning Up After Them Is Where Everyone Else Stops.

On the 404 Monitor tab, the Auto-fix 404s card proposes a redirect target for every logged 404. Preview suggestions shows the proposed target for each one without changing anything; Create all redirects builds the 301s in small batches so even a long log can’t time out. Any 404 that already has a rule is skipped. Every redirect Autopilot creates is tagged, so an Undo last batch button removes exactly what the run made — nothing else.

No. The AI is only ever asked to choose from a shortlist of real, published pages that Linkilo found on your site — it can’t type a free-form URL. If none of the candidates is a good topical match, it says so and Linkilo falls back to the closest match by slug and title. With no OpenAI key configured at all, the whole feature runs on that slug/title best-match instead, so it still works on every site.

Yes. On the Tools tab, click Detect available sources and Linkilo scans for redirects stored by Rank Math, Yoast SEO Premium, the Redirection plugin, AIOSEO, and Simple 301 Redirects. Each detected source shows a count and lets you Preview (a dry run) or Import. Duplicates are skipped automatically so importing twice is safe. Manual CSV import — also with a dry-run preview and per-line error reporting — is still there for everything else.

Flatten chains finds redirects that point at other redirects (/a → /b → /c), previews them, and rewrites each rule to point straight at the final destination — it’s loop-guarded so circular rules can’t break it. Resolve duplicates finds the same source URL used by more than one rule, keeps the newest, and disables the older copies rather than deleting them, so you can re-enable any of them later. Both show you a preview before anything changes.

No. Everything Autopilot does is review-first by default. Preview buttons show you the proposed targets, chains, or duplicate groups and change nothing until you click the apply/create button and confirm. And the 404 Autopilot tags every redirect it creates, so a single Undo cleanly reverses the most recent run. You stay in control at every step.

Click Scan Entire Site and Linkilo walks every published post in every public post type, looking for internal anchor tags whose href matches any URL you’ve redirected. It checks 10 URL variations per redirect (trailing slashes, full URLs, decoded forms) so nothing slips through. Results are sorted by impact — most-polluted redirect first — with expandable per-redirect drill-downs showing the affected post titles, post types, edit links, and the surrounding sentence with the link text highlighted. Then you click Fix Now or bulk-fix several at once.

The Choose Action modal gives you three side-by-side options for every fix. Replace Links updates the href from the old URL to the new destination, keeping the link and its anchor text intact — this is what most people want most of the time. Unlink (Keep Text) removes the anchor tag but keeps the inner text, so the words remain part of your sentence without being a link. Delete Completely strips the entire anchor and its text from the post. The modal shows literal HTML before-and-after examples for each so you can see exactly what will change.

Every bulk link update writes a complete copy of each affected post’s post_content as a per-post backup before changing anything. The batch is recorded with a timestamp and a description like “replaced 47 links in 12 posts”. The Undo History button on the Site Scanner tab opens a modal listing the last 10 batches — click Undo on any batch within 24 hours and every affected post is restored to its exact pre-change HTML. After the 24-hour window, backups are auto-cleaned to avoid database bloat.

301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary), and 307 (Temporary Strict) are the three options in the type picker. Use 301 when content has moved forever — search engines pass SEO value to the new URL. Use 302 for short-lived moves (seasonal pages, A/B tests) where you want the original URL to stay indexed. Use 307 when the request method must be preserved (the strict form is needed for redirects of POST requests, for example).

No. Redirects fire on the parse_request hook at priority 1 — one of the earliest practical hooks in WordPress — before WordPress wastes cycles on a 404 lookup. The lookup uses an indexed database query (key on old_url) so it stays under a millisecond even with thousands of redirects. Cache-busting headers ensure browser and CDN caches don’t trap users on stale rules. Plus, fixing your stale internal links eliminates redirect chains that were slowing pages down before.

An optional setting that improves how auto-redirected posts behave. With Smart Blog Routing on, when you delete a blog post, Linkilo redirects it to its first category page instead of just the homepage. So a deleted “Best Coffee Grinders” post in the Coffee Gear category would 301 to /category/coffee-gear/. Visitors and search engines land somewhere relevant instead of dumped at the front door. With the setting off, deleted posts go to whatever your Default Redirect Target is (homepage, custom URL, or just allowed to 404).

Use a wildcard like /category/* → /topics/* and the captured segment carries through to the destination — /category/coffee/ becomes /topics/coffee/. For more complex patterns, tick “Use regex pattern” and use full PCRE syntax with $1, $2 backreferences in the destination. Cross-domain destinations work too — https://old-domain.com/page/ → https://new-domain.com/page/ is a valid redirect for site migrations.

Each redirect logs the referrer, a timestamp, and a one-way hashed IP (md5 of the IP combined with your WordPress salt). The raw IP is never stored. The Click Analytics modal per redirect shows a traffic-source split (direct, internal, external) computed from referrers, plus the last 50 click timestamps. Aggregate counts and last-clicked times sit on each redirect row in the dashboard. Click data older than 90 days is auto-purged daily by a background cron job — consistent with data-minimisation expectations.

Yes. Under Settings → Email Notifications there’s a Redirection Manager card. You can be emailed when Autopilot auto-creates redirects (with an undo reminder), when your open-404 count crosses a threshold you set (throttled to once a day so it can’t spam you), or as a daily/weekly digest summarising open 404s, active redirects, and how many redirects Autopilot has created. It sends through WordPress’s built-in mail — no SMTP plugin required.

Rank Math and Yoast Premium handle basic redirect creation and 404 monitoring well, but neither scans your post content for stale internal links pointing to redirected URLs — so the redirect chains and link-equity dilution issues stay unfixed. Linkilo’s Site Scanner, three-way Choose Action modal, 404 Autopilot, and per-batch undo are unique to us. They also don’t do redirect chain flattening, traffic-source click analytics, or Smart Blog Routing. And you can import your existing redirects straight from either of them in one click, so switching costs nothing.

Pure WordPress. Linkilo never writes to .htaccess and never asks for server-level access. Redirects are served via the parse_request hook at priority 1, then a template_redirect fallback. This means it works on every WordPress host — shared, managed, VPS, dedicated — and it works with Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed without any server config. It also means your redirects are version-controlled in your WordPress database, not scattered across server config files.

Yes. The Redirection Manager — including the Site Scanner, three-way action choice, 24-hour undo, click analytics, 404 monitor, 404 Autopilot, chain flattening, duplicate resolve, plugin importers, and CSV import — is included in every Linkilo plan at no extra cost. You also get the AI link suggestions, broken link checker, topic clusters, crawl log analyzer, and everything else in the platform. One plugin, one bill.