What is a Soft 404 and What Causes Them?

You've built a solid site. Your pages rank, your content's live, and traffic seems fine, but somewhere in Google Search Console, there's a list of URLs flagged as soft 404s, and you're not totally sure what that means or whether you should care.

You should care. Soft 404s are one of those quiet, sneaky issues that chip away at your SEO over time without triggering an obvious alarm. They don't throw a browser error. Visitors don't always notice, but Google does.

This guide breaks down exactly what a soft 404 is, what causes them, how they damage your rankings, and what you can do about it in 2026.

A soft 404 happens when a page returns a 200 OK status code (meaning "this page exists and loaded successfully") but the actual content on that page signals to Google that there's nothing useful there. It's the web equivalent of showing up to a meeting room that's technically booked but completely empty.

The server says everything's fine. Google disagrees.

Think about it: a normal 404 error tells search engines that a page doesn't exist. That's honest. A soft 404 is dishonest, at least from a search engine's perspective. The URL resolves, the page loads, but the content is missing, thin, or totally irrelevant.

Google's documentation describes soft 404s as pages that "don't exist but return a success code." That's the core of it. The technical response and the actual content are out of sync, and that mismatch confuses crawlers.

How a Soft 404 Differs from a Hard 404

Here's a simple breakdown of the difference:

A hard 404 is clean and clear. A soft 404 is murky, and murky is bad for SEO.

Why Google Cares About Soft 404s

Google's whole job is to surface useful content. When it crawls your site and finds pages that technically load but deliver nothing of value, it wastes crawl budget and lowers its overall impression of your site quality.

Google doesn't just flag the individual page. It factors site-wide content quality into how it crawls and ranks everything else on your domain. So a cluster of soft 404s can drag down pages that are actually doing their job well.

Real talk: Google got smarter about identifying these pages over the past few years. in 2026, its ability to assess content quality at the page level is sharper than ever, which means soft 404 issues that once flew under the radar are much more likely to get caught.

There's no single trigger. Soft 404s show up for a bunch of different reasons, and some are surprisingly easy to create by accident.

Empty or Thin Content Pages

This is probably the most common cause. A page gets created, someone plans to fill it in later, and it just. sits there. No content, or barely any. Maybe there's a heading and a line of placeholder text.

Google visits, sees nothing useful, and flags it.

Thin content is a slightly different beast. The page has some text, maybe a few sentences or a short paragraph, but it doesn't actually answer anything or provide any real value. Google's quality systems treat these the same way: not worth indexing.

Common examples include:

• Blog post drafts accidentally published
• Category pages with no products or posts assigned
• Tag pages that only have one or two entries
• Author pages on sites where that author never posted anything

Deleted Products or Posts That Stay Live

You delete a product, or an event ends, or a blog post gets removed, but instead of returning a proper 404 or 410 status code, the CMS keeps the URL alive and serves a nearly empty page, maybe just the site header and footer with a "this product is no longer available" message.

That's a soft 404. The page loaded, but there's nothing there.

E-commerce sites are especially vulnerable to this. Inventory changes constantly. Products go out of stock. Seasonal items disappear. If your platform doesn't handle deletions cleanly, you can accumulate dozens of these pages without realizing it.

Misconfigured Redirects

Redirects are supposed to send users and crawlers from an old URL to a new one, but sometimes they're set up wrong.

A redirect chain that ends on a thin page, or a redirect that loops back on itself, can result in Google treating the destination as a soft 404. The URL technically resolves, but the destination isn't useful.

Also worth watching: redirect destination pages that were once solid but have since had their content stripped out or minimized.

Search Result Pages Indexed by Mistake

Your site's internal search works great for visitors. For Google? It's a soft 404 factory.

Internal search result pages are dynamic. The URL usually contains query parameters like ? q=shoesor ? search=blue+jacket. If these pages aren't blocked from indexing, Google will crawl them, find content that varies wildly or produces zero results, and flag them as low-quality.

Honest truth: this one catches a lot of site owners off guard. It's not obvious that a functioning feature on your site could create an SEO problem, but search result pages are almost always useless for Googlebot.

Template Pages with No Real Content

Some CMSs auto-generate pages based on templates. Location pages, service pages, date-based archive pages, things like that. If those templates don't get filled in with real, specific content, you end up with pages that have a structure but nothing inside.

Google can tell the difference between a page that has real content tailored to a topic and one that's just a shell. Shell pages get flagged. Every time.

Let's get into the actual damage here. Because soft 404s don't just sit harmlessly in Google Search Console. They actively work against you.

Wasted Crawl Budget

Googlebot doesn't crawl your site infinitely. It has a crawl budget for each domain, based on your site's size, authority, and server performance. Every time it visits a soft 404 page, it uses up some of that budget on a page that's going nowhere.

For small sites, this might not feel catastrophic, but for larger sites with thousands of URLs, soft 404s can eat up so much of the crawl budget that important pages, your best content, your product pages, your high-converting posts, don't get crawled as frequently as they should.

Less frequent crawling means slower updates to your rankings. That's a real cost.

Diluted Link Equity

If other pages on your site or external sites link to a soft 404 page, that link equity is going nowhere. It's not passing authority to anything useful. It's just. sitting there, wasted.

Fix the soft 404 (or redirect it properly) and you can reclaim that equity and send it somewhere that actually helps your rankings.

Lower Content Quality Signals

Google evaluates sites holistically, not just page by page. A domain with a lot of low-quality or empty pages sends a signal that the site overall might not be trustworthy or authoritative.

This affects everything. Your good pages can rank lower because the bad pages are dragging the domain's quality score down. It's not fair, but it's how it works.

In 2026, Google's quality assessments are tightly connected to content depth, engagement signals, and crawl efficiency. Soft 404s hit all three of those areas negatively.

Good news: you don't have to guess. There are several ways to surface these pages and deal with them.

Using Google Search Console

This is your first stop. Google Search Console flags soft 404s directly in the Coverage or Indexing report.

Here's how to find them:

1. Log into Google Search Console
2. Go to "Indexing" and then "Pages"
3. Look for the "Soft 404" entry under the "Why pages aren't indexed" section
4. Click on it to see the full list of affected URLs
5. Export the list so you can work through it systematically

GSC doesn't catch everything, but it's authoritative. If Google says a page is a soft 404, that's what Google believes, and that's what matters for your rankings.

Manual Spot Checks

Sometimes the fastest way to confirm a soft 404 is just to visit the URL yourself. Ask: does this page have real, useful content on it? Would a visitor who landed here get actual value?

If the answer is no, you likely have a soft 404 on your hands.

You can also use browser developer tools or a tool like curlto check what HTTP status code the server is actually returning. If it says 200 but the page is empty or near-empty, that confirms the soft 404 diagnosis.

Crawl Tools That Help

Dedicated crawl tools make it much easier to find and categorize these issues at scale. Here's a comparison of how different tools handle soft 404 detection:

Pro tip: don't rely on just one tool. GSC tells you what Google thinks. A crawl tool tells you what's actually on the page. Use both together.

Once you've found them, fixing soft 404s is usually one of three things. Which option you choose depends on what the page is supposed to do.

Return a Real 404 or 410 Status Code

If the page genuinely has nothing useful on it and there's no content you plan to add, just kill it properly. Configure your server or CMS to return a real 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) status code.

A 410 is actually better than a 404 for pages you've intentionally removed, because it tells Google to stop crawling that URL faster. No point keeping it on Google's radar.

This is the right fix for:

• Deleted products that won't return
• Expired event pages
• Blog posts that were removed and won't be replaced
• Empty placeholder pages that serve no purpose

Redirect to a Relevant Page

If the URL had traffic, backlinks, or relevance to a topic you still cover, set up a 301 redirect to the closest live, relevant page. This preserves any link equity and gives visitors somewhere useful to go.

Be specific with your redirects. A deleted product page should redirect to a closely related product or the relevant category, not just the homepage. Lazy redirects to the homepage are something Google has gotten much better at detecting and ignoring.

Good redirect targets:

• The closest product still available
• The parent category page
• A blog post or guide on the same topic
• A replacement service or updated offer

Restore or Improve the Content

Sometimes the right answer is to fix the page itself. If it was once useful or has potential, add real content to it. Expand thin posts. Fill in empty category pages. Give author pages something worth showing.

This is the best fix when:

• The URL has existing backlinks or traffic history
• The topic is still relevant to your audience
• The page fits into your content strategy
• A redirect doesn't make logical sense

After you've fixed the pages, go back to Google Search Console and use the "Validate Fix" option to ask Google to re-crawl those URLs. Don't skip this step. It speeds up the process of getting those pages re-evaluated.

Finding and fixing soft 404s is one thing. Staying on top of them as your site grows is another challenge entirely. That's where Semly Pro comes in.

Semly Pro is built for SEO professionals, agencies, and content teams who can't afford to let content health issues pile up quietly in the background. It gives you the tools to catch these problems early, act on them fast, and keep your site's quality signals strong.

Content Auditing at Scale

Every Semly Pro plan includes content audits. On the Pro plan (€139/mo), you get 15 content audits per month. On Business Pro (€229/mo), that goes up to 40. The Managed SEO plan (€469/mo) includes unlimited audits, all run by Semly Pro's team on your behalf.

Content audits surface exactly the kind of thin, empty, and low-quality pages that trigger soft 404 flags. You get a clear view of what's dragging down your site's quality signals and what needs attention first.

This isn't a once-a-year exercise. Running regular audits means you catch soft 404-type issues before Google does, which is exactly where you want to be.

AI Visibility Tracking

Soft 404s don't just hurt your traditional search rankings. in 2026, they also affect how your content performs in AI-driven search environments like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.

Semly Pro's AI visibility score tracks how your content is being cited and surfaced across these platforms. If soft 404s are pulling down your domain quality, you'll see it reflected in your AI visibility metrics, and you'll know where to focus your cleanup efforts.

The Business Pro and Managed SEO plans include advanced AI metrics and LLMs. txt generation, which helps signal to AI crawlers which of your pages are high-quality and worth referencing. That's a direct counter to the damage soft 404s can do to your broader content authority.

Here's a quick look at what each Semly Pro plan covers for content and audit needs:

All plans come with a 7-day free trial, no commitment required. If you're ready to get your content health under control and stop soft 404s from quietly undermining your rankings, it's worth getting started today.

Soft 404s sit in a confusing middle ground between real errors and working pages. Here's how they compare to other status codes you'll run into:

The key takeaway here is that soft 404s are uniquely problematic because they look fine on the surface. Other errors are obvious. A soft 404 requires you to look past the status code and actually evaluate the content.

That's why they're so easy to miss, and why so many sites carry them around for months without fixing them.

Make it a habit to run content audits regularly. Your site's quality signals will thank you for it, and so will your rankings.

What is a soft 404 in simple terms?

A soft 404 is a page that loads successfully (the server returns a 200 OK status code) but has no real content on it. Google treats it like a missing or useless page even though the URL technically works. It's essentially a page that exists on your server but has nothing worth indexing.

Is a soft 404 the same as a regular 404 error?

No. A regular 404 (or "hard 404") means the server tells Google the page doesn't exist and returns a 404 status code. A soft 404 returns a 200 status code but the page is empty, thin, or irrelevant. The end result for SEO is similar, but the way they're detected and handled is different. Soft 404s are trickier because they don't announce themselves.

Do soft 404s affect Google rankings?

Yes, they can. Soft 404s waste crawl budget, send weak content quality signals to Google, and can dilute your domain's overall authority. If your site has a lot of them, your well-performing pages may rank lower than they should because the overall quality of the domain is being dragged down.

How do I find soft 404s on my website?

The fastest way is through Google Search Console. Go to the "Pages" section under "Indexing" and look for "Soft 404" in the list of reasons why pages aren't indexed. You can also use crawl tools or content audit platforms like Semly Pro to identify thin or empty pages that could be triggering these flags.

What's the best way to fix a soft 404?

It depends on the page. If the page has no future, return a proper 404 or 410 status code. If it has backlinks or traffic history, set up a 301 redirect to a relevant live page. If the page has real potential, add substantive content to it so it earns its place in the index. After fixing, use the "Validate Fix" feature in Google Search Console to speed up re-crawling.

Can a page with some content still be a soft 404?

Yes. Thin content pages, meaning pages with only a sentence or two, boilerplate text, or duplicate content copied from elsewhere, can still be flagged as soft 404s. Google's quality systems are pretty good at distinguishing between pages that genuinely answer something and pages that just technically have words on them. Depth and relevance matter.

Are internal search result pages soft 404s?

They often are, especially if Google can crawl them. Internal search pages are dynamic, change with every query, and frequently return zero or near-zero results for specific searches. Google usually flags them as low-quality or soft 404-type pages. The fix is to block those URLs from being indexed using your robots. txt file or a noindex meta tag.

How long does it take Google to fix a soft 404 after I correct it?

It varies. After you make the fix, you can request re-crawling through Google Search Console's "Validate Fix" option. Google will usually process the change within a few days to a few weeks, depending on your site's crawl frequency and overall authority. Larger, higher-traffic sites tend to see updates faster.

Can soft 404s hurt my AI search visibility in 2026?

Yes. AI-driven search tools like Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT pull from pages they trust. Soft 404s and thin content lower your domain's trustworthiness signals, which can reduce how often your content gets cited in AI-generated answers. Tools like Semly Pro's AI visibility tracking help you monitor and protect that visibility.

How often should I check my site for soft 404s?

At minimum, once a month. If your site publishes frequently, sells products, or goes through regular content updates, you should check more often. Running regular content audits, ideally through a platform that flags thin or empty pages automatically, is the most efficient way to stay ahead of the problem rather than reacting after the damage is done.