Audit your menus for links that go nowhere

Navigation rots quietly. A page gets trashed, a post goes back to draft while somebody rewrites it, a link gets typed with a stray character, and the menu item survives all of it. Nothing warns you, because WordPress keeps menu items and content in separate places and never checks one against the other. The first person to notice is usually a visitor landing on a 404.

This prompt does that check for you. It reads every menu, reads your real content, compares the two, and tells you which links point at nothing. It writes nothing and touches no menu.

Audit the navigation menus on this site for links that go nowhere. Read only,
change nothing.

Start by listing every menu with its name and how many items it has. Then read
the items in each one, showing me the label, the URL, and what each item
actually links to.

Now build the other side of the comparison: list my pages and posts, including
anything sitting in drafts or in the trash, so you have a real inventory to
check against. Cross-reference the two and flag every menu item whose target
is missing, unpublished, or trashed. For each one, give me the menu it lives
in, the label a visitor sees, and what it is pointing at.

List any custom URLs separately, since you cannot verify where those actually
lead, and say plainly that they need a manual check. Report menu by menu with
the worst offenders first, and recommend nothing until I ask.

Why this is safe to run

All four abilities here are reads. Listing menus, reading a menu’s items, listing pages, and listing posts each report what is already there and cannot add, rename, or remove a link. The menu write abilities, the ones that could actually change your navigation, are a separate set with separate switches, and this recipe never asks for them. So the output is a list of suspects, and every fix stays a decision you make on your own.

Two honest notes on the method. There is no built-in broken-menu-links report in WordPress to read, so the answer is derived: the agent compares your menu items against the pages and posts it can list, and anything with no match is flagged. That comparison is only as complete as the inventory behind it, so scope the content list generously when you run it. And no read here fetches a URL, which means a menu item pointing at an external site cannot be tested for a 404 at all. Those come back on their own list, labeled as unverified, rather than being passed off as fine.

One access note. The menu reads are gated behind the edit-theme-options capability, so the user you bound the agent to needs it or the audit will come back denied rather than empty. Every call runs against that user’s real capability and lands in the Activity Log.

Already connected? Skip the paste. Ask your agent for the “audit your menus for links that go nowhere” recipe, or just ask which of your navigation links point at missing pages, and it runs the same reads against your own site.