Broken Link Checker & Redirect Auditor — Find Every 404 on Your Website

Crawl an entire website and get a clean list of every broken link, broken image, dead script/stylesheet, server error and long redirect chain, together with the page it appears on and its anchor text — so you can fix it in minutes.

Built for SEO specialists, agencies, web developers and site owners who need a fast, affordable website link audit without installing desktop crawlers.

What it finds

Issue	Severity
404 / 410 not found (internal or external)	🔴 high
5xx server errors	🔴 high
DNS failures, SSL/TLS errors, timeouts, redirect loops	🔴 high
Other 4xx errors	🔴/🟠
Redirect chains longer than your threshold	🟠 medium
Mixed content (http resources on https pages)	🟠 medium
Internal links that redirect (update them to the final URL)	🟢 low
External links that block bots (401/403/429/999, e.g. LinkedIn)	⚪ info — verify manually, not counted as broken

Every URL is checked once, even if it appears on hundreds of pages; you see the number of occurrences and up to 25 source pages.

Why this link checker?

• ✅ Whole-site crawl — follows internal links up to your page/depth limits, checks external links without crawling them.
• ✅ Fewer false positives — HEAD first, then confirms with GET before calling anything broken; bot-blocking sites are flagged as "info", not "broken".
• ✅ Images, CSS, JS, iframes — not just <a> tags.
• ✅ Polite — respects robots.txt (Google-style wildcards), modest concurrency, honest user agent.
• ✅ Cheap & predictable — pay only for pages that were actually crawled (on-site HTML pages that load with status 200); all link checks on those pages are included. Error pages, PDFs/images and pages that redirect to another site are reported but never charged.
• ✅ Schedulable — run weekly and send results to Slack, email, Google Sheets, n8n, Make or Zapier.

Input

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.example.com/" }],
  "maxPages": 50,
  "maxDepth": 10,
  "checkExternalLinks": true,
  "checkImages": true,
  "redirectChainThreshold": 1,
  "reportRedirects": true,
  "excludeUrlPatterns": ["/wp-admin/", "\\?replytocom="]
}

Output (one row per problem URL)

{
  "url": "https://www.example.com/old-pricing",
  "severity": "high",
  "issue": "broken (not found)",
  "statusCode": 404,
  "linkType": "internal",
  "elementType": "a",
  "foundOn": "https://www.example.com/blog/launch",
  "anchorText": "see our pricing",
  "occurrences": 14,
  "allSources": [{ "page": "https://www.example.com/blog/launch", "anchorText": "see our pricing" }],
  "redirectCount": 0,
  "redirectChain": [],
  "finalUrl": "https://www.example.com/old-pricing"
}

Export to CSV/Excel/JSON or fetch via API. A SUMMARY record shows pages crawled, links checked and issue counts. Turn on Output every link for a full link inventory.

Pricing

$2.00 per 1,000 pages crawled (pay-per-event, page-crawled). A page counts as crawled only when it is an HTML page on your site that loads with status 200. Checking all links, images and resources found on those pages is included.

What will it cost?

Pages crawled	Cost
50 pages (the pre-filled form)	$0.10
300 pages	$0.60
1,000 pages	$2.00
10,000 pages	$20.00

maxPages caps how many pages are fetched, so it also caps the cost. Each run also has a $0.00005 start fee (one per GB of memory; the default memory needs one), which is too small to change these numbers. You pay only for these events: no rental fee and no separate compute charge. Set a maximum cost per run in the run options (or maxTotalChargeUsd in the API) and the Actor stops cleanly when it reaches it.

Use it via API, code or AI agents

Everything in the Console also works over the API, so you can run it from code, a scheduler or an AI agent. Replace <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN> with your token from Apify Console → Settings → API & Integrations.

REST: run and get the results in one call (waits up to 5 minutes; maxTotalChargeUsd caps what the run can cost):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/batreek~broken-link-checker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?maxTotalChargeUsd=1" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.example.com/"}], "maxPages": 50}'

Python (pip install apify-client):

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("batreek/broken-link-checker").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://www.example.com/"
        }
    ],
    "maxPages": 50
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

JavaScript / Node.js (npm install apify-client):

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('batreek/broken-link-checker').call({"startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.example.com/"}], "maxPages": 50});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

AI agents (MCP): add this Actor as a tool in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client through Apify's hosted MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com?tools=batreek/broken-link-checker. The agent can then audit a website for broken links and read the structured results. Runs are billed to your Apify account like any other run.

No-code: use Apify's integrations (Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks) or put it on an Apify Schedule.

FAQ

Will it crawl other websites? No. It only crawls the host of your start URL; external links are checked with a single request each. Does it render JavaScript? No — it checks links present in the HTML, which is what search engines see first. JS-only links are not discovered. Why is a link marked "info"? Some sites (LinkedIn, Amazon, some CDNs) refuse automated requests. The link may be fine in a browser. Can I audit a site I don't own? Yes, for public pages, but please keep concurrency low; the Actor respects robots.txt by default.