Testing that page is not 404 page with Cypress and Gatsby - testing

Question

I have a Gatsby site. If I hit a url that doesn't exist, Gatsby serves up a 404 page, however it doesn't change the URL.
I am testing this site using Cypress. Cypress's recommended way of testing navigation within a site is the use of location, however in this instance, checking the pathname of the page that was navigated to is not reliable, as if the page doesn't exist, it will still have the same pathname as if it did. For example if I get Cypress to cy.click() a link with an href of /incorrect-url/, and test its pathname, I would get a passing test, even though the page that loaded was the 404 page, not the page I was expecting.
I know I could test that elements I am expecting are present on the page I've navigated to, but I'd prefer a reliable way to know if the page 404d (Gatsby returns the page with a 404 status code).
To summarise:
checking the Location / pathname is not a reliable way of testing that a specific page has loaded
I don't want to check for elements on the page as a way of verifying
Surely there is way of verifying that the page loaded without a 404 status code.
How can I reliably check that the page navigated to was not the 404 page.

Answer 1

I know the question was asked 2 months ago, so hopefully you've already found a way to validate the status, but as a future reference, you can do a request to your link's href attribute. You will then have access to the status code.
cy.get(SELECTOR FOR YOUR LINK).then((link) => cy.request(link.prop('href')).its('status').should('eq', 200));