A missing page has two stories. The page a person sees can say “not found,” while the HTTP response
still says 200 OK. That mismatch is easy to miss in a browser and useful to catch before a launch.
Indie404 asks one generated path that should not exist. It also asks the home page as a baseline. The answer shows the final status, every redirect, the final URL, both page titles, and a bounded visible-text comparison. A copied home page becomes evidence instead of a hunch.
HTTP 404 is the ordinary protocol answer when the origin did not find a current representation. HTTP 410 is the stronger answer when the origin expects the absence to be permanent. Google calls a page a soft 404 when its content says it is an error while its status says success. Indie404 links those rules next to the response it measured.
The comparison has a limit on purpose. Indie404 does not render client-side JavaScript, does not see Search Console, and does not claim to reproduce Google’s classifier. It checks one random path at one instant from Cloudflare’s network. Another route can behave differently.
The check is free. It needs no account, card, API key, or premium plan. The two response bodies are read only far enough to compare them. They are not stored, and the lookup never becomes a public directory entry.