Before drafts are saved or evaluated, the outreach pipeline verifies every cited URL by dispatching streaming byte-range HTTP requests through an SSRF-safe probe to check HTTP status codes without downloading full web pages. When a supporting external citation returns a 4xx, 5xx, or network failure, the pruner cleanly unwraps the markdown link back into plain anchor text to maintain sentence flow, while strictly safeguarding the primary target URL so the client's core link placement is never stripped.