Link, anchor, and form action hrefs resolve to pages
Why it matters
Broken internal hrefs turn into visible 404s the moment a user clicks a nav item — they are the most common user-facing symptom of AI hallucination because the model names a page from its training intuition rather than your routing tree. <Link href='/dashbord'> will silently deploy, get indexed by crawlers, and then 404 every visitor who lands on it. Reference integrity at the navigation layer is load-bearing for crawlability and for bounce rate on marketing pages.
Severity rationale
High because every broken internal href is a 404 a user can trigger by clicking, and search engines penalize the domain for it.
Remediation
For each unresolved href, either fix the path to match an existing page file or create the missing page. In the Next.js App Router, the href must map to a page.tsx at the corresponding directory:
// Matches app/dashboard/page.tsx
<Link href="/dashboard">Dashboard</Link>
For dynamic routes, ensure the segment file exists — for example app/posts/[id]/page.tsx for the href /posts/123.
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the Hallucinated References Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from ai-slop-hallucinations·automated