Broken Link Checker - Find 404s & Redirects (Crawl or List)

✅ Tested daily with its default input (Apify's automated QA plus our own smoke test before every release).

Broken link checker: dead links hurt SEO, annoy visitors and make a site look abandoned. Point this Actor at one or more pages and it checks every link on them (optionally crawling the site), or hand it a list of URLs and it checks exactly those. You get 404s, 5xx errors, timeouts and redirect chains plus the pages that link to each URL, for $0.00045 per link.

Two modes

• crawl (default): reads the pages you give it, optionally follows internal links on the same host up to maxPages (breadth-first, robots.txt respected), and checks every unique link it finds — internal and external.
• list: checks only the URLs you supply. Useful for backlink lists, sitemap exports or a CSV of product URLs.

What you get per link

• status (HTTP code) and broken (true for 4xx/5xx, timeouts, DNS or SSL errors)
• finalUrl, number of redirects and the full redirectChain with the status of each hop
• linkType: internal, external or listed
• foundOn: up to 10 pages that contain the link, plus the anchorText
• error text for timeouts, SSL problems, redirect loops and connection failures

Each link is checked once per run, no matter how many pages it appears on. A HEAD request is tried first; servers that refuse HEAD get a light GET instead, so you don't see false 405s.

Input

Field	Default	Description
startUrls	–	Pages to scan (crawl mode) or URLs to check (list mode)
mode	crawl	crawl or list
maxPages	1	Pages to read per start URL (1 = only the start page)
maxLinks	1000	Hard cap on unique links checked (and charged) per run
checkExternal	true	Also check links to other domains
includeImages	false	Also check images, scripts and stylesheets
onlyBroken	false	Only output broken links
timeoutSecs	15	Per-request timeout

Output example

{
  "url": "https://example.org/old-page", "status": 404, "broken": true,
  "finalUrl": "https://example.org/old-page", "redirects": 0, "linkType": "internal",
  "foundOn": ["https://example.org/", "https://example.org/blog"], "anchorText": "Read more"
}

The key-value store record OUTPUT contains a summary (pages read, links checked, broken count and a list of broken links) — ready for a webhook, Slack or email integration on a schedule.

Pricing (pay per event)

• $0.00045 per unique link checked. Reading the pages themselves is free. maxLinks keeps your cost predictable.

Fair use

Only the pages you supply (and, in crawl mode, pages of the same host allowed by robots.txt) are read. Requests are identified with a clear user agent. No personal data is collected — the output contains URLs and status codes only.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This Actor can be used as a tool by AI agents (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, other MCP clients) through the official Apify MCP server:

• Add only this Actor as a tool: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=admirala/broken-link-checker-bulk (sign in with OAuth or an Apify API token).
• Or connect https://mcp.apify.com and let the agent find it with search-actors (e.g. "broken link checker"), read the input schema with fetch-actor-details and run it with call-actor.

Example input an agent can pass:

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://books.toscrape.com/"
  ],
  "mode": "crawl",
  "maxPages": 20,
  "onlyBroken": true
}

Cost per call: $0.00045 per unique link checked; reading pages is free. maxLinks caps cost. Results come back as dataset items (get-dataset-items).

FAQ

How do I find broken links on my website? Put your homepage in startUrls, keep mode: crawl and raise maxPages. Set onlyBroken: true to see only problems.

Can I check a list of URLs for 404 errors? Yes, use mode: list; each URL gets its status code, final URL and redirect chain.

Does it respect robots.txt? Yes, in crawl mode only pages allowed by robots.txt on the same host are read.

Related actors

• SSL Certificate Checker - Bulk Expiry, Chain & TLS
• Website Uptime Monitor - Status, Response Time & SSL
• Domain Expiry Checker - Bulk WHOIS/RDAP Expiration Dates (coming soon to Apify Store)
• WHOIS Lookup Bulk - Domain RDAP, DNS Records & SSL
• SPF, DKIM & DMARC Checker - Bulk Email Deliverability Audit (coming soon to Apify Store)
• Security Headers Checker - Bulk HSTS, CSP Audit (A+ to F) (coming soon to Apify Store)
• Tech Stack Detector - BuiltWith & Wappalyzer Alternative