Broken Link Checker - Find 404s & Dead Links

What does Broken Link Checker do?

Broken Link Checker crawls your website and tests every internal and external link it finds. It reports 404s, 5xx server errors, timeouts, DNS failures and redirects, and tells you which page each broken link is on and its anchor text, so you can fix it in minutes.

It is a bulk dead link checker, 404 checker and website link validator for SEO audits, site migrations and content maintenance – no installation, no browser extension.

Why use it?

• 🔗 Whole-site audit – start from your homepage and scan up to thousands of pages on the same domain.
• 🧭 Actionable output – every link comes with the pages that contain it and the link text.
• ⚡ Fast and light – HEAD requests with smart GET fallback, high parallelism, no browser.
• 🛡️ Fewer false alarms – sites that block bots (403/429/999, e.g. some social networks) are labelled blocked-or-auth instead of broken.
• 💸 Predictable price – pay per link checked, with a maxLinksToCheck cap.
• 📊 Summary – totals (pages crawled, links found, links checked, broken) are saved to the SUMMARY record in the key-value store.

How to use it

1. Enter your homepage (or any page) in Start pages.
2. Set Max pages to crawl (use 1 to check only the links on the start pages).
3. Optionally switch on Output only broken links.
4. Click Start. Schedule it weekly to catch new broken links automatically.

Input example

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com" }],
  "maxPagesToCrawl": 50,
  "maxLinksToCheck": 2000,
  "checkExternalLinks": true,
  "onlyBrokenLinks": true
}

Output example

{
  "url": "https://example.com/old-page",
  "isInternal": true,
  "anchorText": "Old page",
  "foundOnPages": ["https://example.com/", "https://example.com/blog"],
  "statusCode": 404,
  "finalUrl": "https://example.com/old-page",
  "redirected": false,
  "ok": false,
  "status": "broken",
  "error": null
}

status is one of ok, redirected, blocked-or-auth, broken (HTTP 4xx/5xx) or unreachable (timeout, DNS or connection error).

How much does it cost?

This Actor uses pay-per-event (PPE) pricing: you pay only for results, and the Apify platform compute it uses is already included.

Event	Price	Per 1,000
Link checked	$0.0005 per link	$0.50 per 1,000 links
Actor start	$0.0005 per run	–

Each unique link is charged once, no matter how many pages it appears on. Use Max links to check to cap the cost. For example, 1,000 links cost about $0.50. The Actor start fee is charged once per run (one event per GB of memory; the default memory setting counts as one). You can set a maximum cost per run in the run options and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly credit, enough to try it at no cost.

Use cases

• SEO audits – broken links waste crawl budget and hurt rankings and user experience.
• Website migrations and redesigns – find links that broke after URLs changed.
• Scheduled monitoring – run weekly and get a Slack or email alert when new broken links appear.
• Agencies – audit client sites in bulk; check their SSL certificates with SSL Certificate & DNS Checker.

FAQ

Does it check external links? Yes, when Check external links is on. External pages are tested but not crawled.

Why is a link labelled blocked-or-auth? The server answered 401/403/429/999, which usually means bot protection or a login, not a dead page.

Limitations

• Links are discovered in the HTML source. Links added only by JavaScript are not found.
• Please only crawl websites you own or are allowed to audit.

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Questions or feature requests? Use the Issues tab.