Broken Links Checker

Find every broken link on your website before visitors and search engines do. Broken links tank user experience and leak link equity during site migrations — this actor crawls your pages, checks every link (internal and external), and reports exactly which URLs return 404, 5xx, or timeout errors. Configure crawl depth, page limits, and concurrency to match sites of any size.

Features

• Deep crawling — follows internal links up to a configurable depth to discover broken links across your entire site
• Internal and external — optionally checks outbound links to third-party sites, not just internal pages
• Smart link checking — uses HEAD requests first, falls back to GET when servers block HEAD
• Per-page reporting — groups broken links by the page they appear on for easy triage
• Redirect chain tracking — captures the full redirect chain for each broken link
• Same-domain filtering — restrict crawling to the start URL's domain or allow cross-domain discovery
• Configurable limits — set max pages, max depth, and max links per page to control scope and cost

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	Yes	—	Pages to begin crawling from (request list format)
maxPages	integer	No	100	Maximum number of pages to crawl
maxDepth	integer	No	3	How many link levels deep to follow from the start URLs
sameDomainOnly	boolean	No	true	Only crawl pages on the same domain as the start URL
checkExternalLinks	boolean	No	false	Also check outbound links to external domains
maxLinksPerPage	integer	No	200	Maximum number of links to check on each crawled page
timeoutSeconds	integer	No	20	HTTP timeout in seconds for each link check
concurrency	integer	No	5	Number of pages to process in parallel
userAgent	string	No	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ApifyActor/1.0; +https://apify.com)	Custom User-Agent header for HTTP requests

Input Example

{
    "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://crawlee.dev" }],
    "maxPages": 200,
    "maxDepth": 3,
    "checkExternalLinks": true,
    "sameDomainOnly": true
}

Output

Each crawled page produces one dataset item listing all broken links found on that page.

• pageUrl (string) — the page that was crawled
• depth (number) — how many links deep from the start URL
• pageStatus (number | null) — HTTP status of the crawled page itself
• brokenCount (number) — total broken links found on this page
• brokenLinks (array) — list of broken links with url, status, finalUrl, redirectChain, and error
• checkedAt (string) — ISO timestamp
• error (string | null) — error if the page itself could not be fetched

Output Example

{
    "pageUrl": "https://crawlee.dev/docs/introduction",
    "depth": 1,
    "pageStatus": 200,
    "brokenCount": 2,
    "brokenLinks": [
        {
            "url": "https://crawlee.dev/docs/old-guide",
            "status": 404,
            "finalUrl": "https://crawlee.dev/docs/old-guide",
            "redirectChain": [],
            "error": null
        },
        {
            "url": "https://external-site.com/removed-page",
            "status": null,
            "finalUrl": null,
            "redirectChain": [],
            "error": "ECONNREFUSED"
        }
    ],
    "checkedAt": "2025-11-20T14:30:00.000Z",
    "error": null
}

Pricing

Event	Cost
Page Crawled	$0.001 per page

You are charged per page crawled. Platform usage fees apply separately.

Use Cases

• Pre-migration audits — scan your entire site before a domain or CMS migration to establish a baseline
• Post-migration validation — verify no links broke after launching on a new domain or URL structure
• SEO health checks — find and fix broken internal links that waste crawl budget and leak link equity
• Client reporting — agencies can schedule weekly runs to catch broken links before clients notice
• External link monitoring — detect when third-party resources you link to go offline

Related Actors

Actor	What it adds
Redirect Chain Analyzer	Trace the full redirect chain for URLs to diagnose redirect loops and chains
Hreflang Checker	Validate hreflang tags on multilingual pages found during crawling
XML Sitemap URL Extractor	Extract all URLs from your sitemap to use as start URLs for a comprehensive crawl