# Broken Link Checker - Find 404s & Dead Links (`digital-tools/broken-link-checker`) Actor

Crawl a website and check every internal and external link for 404s, 5xx errors, timeouts and redirects. Shows which page each broken link is on and its anchor text. Fast HTTP-only SEO audit, pay only per link checked.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/digital-tools/broken-link-checker.md
- **Developed by:** [凡 方](https://apify.com/digital-tools) (community)
- **Categories:** SEO tools, Developer tools, Automation
- **Security:** Limited permissions
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

Pay per event

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

### 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

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

#### Output example

```json
{
  "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](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/ssl-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.

### Other tools by Digital-Tools

- [Webpage to Markdown for LLMs & RAG](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/webpage-to-markdown) – Convert any web page URL into clean, LLM-ready Markdown.
- [URL Metadata & Open Graph Link Preview Extractor](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/url-metadata-extractor) – Get title, description, preview image, favicon, canonical URL, Open Graph, Twitter Card, RSS feeds and JSON-LD schema from any list of URLs.
- [Chinese Simplified/Traditional Converter & Pinyin Toolkit](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/chinese-text-toolkit) – Bulk convert Simplified ↔ Traditional Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong variants with phrase conversion), generate pinyin with tones or initials, segment Chinese words and extract keywords.
- [Sitemap URL Extractor - Get All URLs from sitemap.xml](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/sitemap-url-extractor) – Extract every URL from a website's XML sitemaps.
- [RSS & Atom Feed Reader - Parse Any Feed to JSON](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/rss-feed-reader) – Read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds in bulk and get clean JSON: title, link, date, author, categories, summary, full content, images and podcast enclosures.
- [SSL Certificate & DNS Checker - Bulk Domain Expiry Monitor](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/ssl-dns-checker) – Check SSL/TLS certificates and DNS records for many domains at once: expiry date, days left, issuer, SANs, TLS version, validity, plus A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, CAA, SOA, SPF and DMARC.
- [PDF, Word, PowerPoint & Excel to Text Extractor](https://apify.com/Digital-Tools/document-to-text) – Extract text from PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX files by URL.

Questions or feature requests? Use the **Issues** tab.

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

Pages to start from. Links on these pages (and on other pages of the same site, up to the crawl limit) are checked.

## `maxPagesToCrawl` (type: `integer`):

How many pages of the same website to scan for links. Use 1 to check only the links on the start pages.

## `maxLinksToCheck` (type: `integer`):

Upper limit of unique links to check. Keeps cost predictable.

## `checkExternalLinks` (type: `boolean`):

Also check links pointing to other websites.

## `onlyBrokenLinks` (type: `boolean`):

Save only broken/unreachable links to the dataset (all links are still checked).

## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

How many URLs to fetch in parallel.

## `timeoutSecs` (type: `integer`):

Timeout for each HTTP request.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com"
    }
  ],
  "maxPagesToCrawl": 20,
  "maxLinksToCheck": 1000,
  "checkExternalLinks": true,
  "onlyBrokenLinks": false,
  "maxConcurrency": 10,
  "timeoutSecs": 15
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

Dataset with one item per processed input.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://example.com"
        }
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("digital-tools/broken-link-checker").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://example.com" }] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("digital-tools/broken-link-checker").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com"
    }
  ]
}' |
apify call digital-tools/broken-link-checker --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,digital-tools/broken-link-checker"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/cr1O2YMVQeGJPalvR/builds/QqjWAOO4XuiNpuZpu/openapi.json