Broken Link Checker — Recursive Site Crawler

Find every broken link on your website. Recursively crawl from any start URL and report all 404 errors, bad redirects, timeouts, and server errors — with the exact page and anchor text where each broken link was found.

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Why this exists

Broken links hurt your SEO rankings, frustrate visitors, and make your site look unmaintained. Manually checking links on a 500-page site takes hours. This actor crawls your entire site in minutes, checks every internal and external link, and gives you a structured report.

• Recursive crawling — follows internal links up to a configurable depth, not just one page
• External link checking — lightweight HEAD requests to verify links to other domains
• Status categorization — every link classified as broken (404/410/5xx), redirect (301/302), timeout, or OK
• Severity levels — critical (404, 5xx), warning (redirects, timeouts), info (working links)
• Context — shows which page the broken link was found on and what the anchor text says
• 100 links — try it on your site with zero risk

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Quick start

{
    "startUrl": "https://example.com",
    "maxDepth": 3,
    "maxPages": 500,
    "checkExternalLinks": true
}

Hit Start and get a full report in minutes.

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Feature comparison

Feature	HTTP Status Checker	parseforge	This actor
Single URL check	Yes	Yes	Yes
Recursive site crawl	No	Yes	Yes
External link checking	No	Yes	Yes
Status categorization	No	Basic	404/301/302/500/timeout
Severity classification	No	No	critical / warning / info
Anchor text context	No	No	Yes
Source page tracking	No	Yes	Yes
Configurable depth	No	Yes	Yes
Configurable max pages	No	Yes	Yes
Respect robots.txt	No	No	Yes (configurable)
URL pattern exclusion	No	No	Yes (glob patterns)
Dry run mode	No	No	Yes
Free tier	No	No	100 links free

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrl	string	(required)	URL to start crawling from
maxDepth	integer	3	Maximum link depth to follow (1–10)
maxPages	integer	500	Maximum pages to crawl (1–10,000)
checkExternalLinks	boolean	true	Check links pointing to other domains
respectRobotsTxt	boolean	true	Skip pages disallowed by robots.txt
ignoredPatterns	array	[]	URL patterns to skip (glob-style: *logout*, *admin*)
outputFormat	enum	broken-only	broken-only or all
sitemapUrl	string	(auto-detect)	URL to sitemap.xml. If not set, auto-checks /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml
webhookUrl	string	(optional)	POST full JSON results to this URL when audit completes
googleSheetsId	string	(optional)	Export broken links to this Google Sheet (spreadsheet ID)
googleServiceAccountKey	string	(optional)	Google Service Account JSON key for Sheets export
dryRun	boolean	false	Preview what would be crawled — no charges

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Output

{
    "status": "success",
    "startUrl": "https://example.com",
    "summary": {
        "pagesChecked": 142,
        "linksChecked": 1847,
        "brokenLinks": 12,
        "redirects": 34,
        "errors": 3
    },
    "brokenLinks": [
        {
            "url": "https://example.com/old-page",
            "statusCode": 404,
            "statusCategory": "broken",
            "severity": "critical",
            "foundOn": "https://example.com/blog/post-1",
            "anchorText": "Learn more",
            "lastChecked": "2026-04-13T10:30:00Z",
            "error": null
        }
    ]
}

Status categories

Category	HTTP codes	Severity	Meaning
broken	404, 410, 5xx	critical	Link target is dead or server is failing
redirect	301, 302, 303, 307, 308	warning	Link works but goes through a redirect — consider updating
timeout	—	warning	Server did not respond within 10 seconds
error	—	critical	Network error, DNS failure, or connection refused
ok	2xx	info	Link is working (only shown in all output mode)

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Pricing

$0.003 per link checked (pay-per-event pricing).

• Only charged on successful runs — errors and dry runs are never charged.
• 500 links = $1.50
• 2,000 links = $6.00

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Performance

• Uses CheerioCrawler (pure HTTP) — no headless browser overhead
• Default concurrency handled by Crawlee's built-in request queue
• External links checked with parallel HEAD requests (batches of 20)
• Typical: 200–500 links/minute depending on target site response time
• 10-second timeout per request, 1 retry on failure

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Limitations

• JavaScript-rendered links are not detected. This actor uses HTTP requests only (CheerioCrawler), not a headless browser. Links injected by JavaScript after page load will be missed.
• Some sites aggressively block crawlers. If you see many timeouts, try reducing maxConcurrency or disabling checkExternalLinks.
• External links are checked with HEAD requests only. Some servers respond differently to HEAD vs GET — a HEAD 404 does not always mean GET would also 404.
• Maximum 10,000 pages per run to prevent runaway costs.

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Related Tools by Rashadamom

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Run on Apify

No setup needed. Click above to run in the cloud. $0.003 per operation.