How To Find Placeholder Urls (href=”#”) With Screaming Frog

When building new sites, developers often use # links as placeholders while the real pages are still being built. The problem? These links sometimes slip through to production and prevent users from accessing content.

Here’s a quick Screaming Frog check I like to run before (or right after) a site launch:

1. Go to: Custom > Custom Extraction > Add
2. Name it: Ahref Contains Only #
3. Set Type: XPath and paste: //a[@href='#'] (This ensures you only return placeholder links, not valid relative URLs.)
4. Select: Extract HTML Element so you can see the anchor text and surrounding context.
5. Run your crawl.
6. Click the Custom Extraction tab at the top.
7. On the left you will see what URLs have placeholder links; scroll to the right to see every instance a link contains only #.