Broken Structured Data Scanner

What does Broken Structured Data Scanner do?

Broken Structured Data Scanner crawls websites and finds malformed, missing, duplicated, inconsistent, or suspicious structured data. It reports JSON-LD parse failures, basic Microdata and RDFa coverage, common Schema.org value problems, page-level validity, and a site-wide Structured Data Health Score. Try it with a public website such as apify.com.

Run it on the Apify platform to use API access, schedules, integrations, proxy rotation, run monitoring, and downloadable datasets. The scanner uses fast HTTP requests and does not execute page scripts.

Why use Broken Structured Data Scanner?

• Audit structured-data quality across many pages instead of checking pages individually.
• Find broken JSON-LD deployments after CMS, theme, or analytics changes.
• Identify pages without structured data and see which Schema.org types occur most often.
• Feed stable issue codes into QA checks, dashboards, alerts, and Website Intelligence API workflows.
• Prioritize fixes with severity counts, type frequencies, top issue codes, and a transparent health score.

How to use Broken Structured Data Scanner

1. Open the Actor and go to the Input tab.
2. Add one or more start URLs. Multiple start URLs may point to different websites.
3. Set the page and depth limits, then choose which structured-data formats to scan.
4. Optionally add URL patterns or a proxy configuration.
5. Click Start.
6. Review page records in the Dataset and the site-wide summary in the OUTPUT key-value record.

Input

The startUrls field is required. There is no Actor-imposed maximum number of seed URLs; maxPages controls the total number of pages processed across all seeds.

Field	Default	Description
startUrls	https://apify.com	One or more HTTP(S) seed URLs.
maxPages	500	Total page limit across all seeds.
maxDepth	0	Link depth. The default scans only supplied URLs.
sameDomainOnly	true	Keeps discovered links on the hostname of their seed.
includePatterns	[]	Case-insensitive wildcard filters using * and ?.
excludePatterns	[]	Wildcard exclusions; exclusions override inclusions.
scanJsonLd	true	Scan JSON-LD blocks.
scanMicrodata	true	Scan basic Microdata markup.
scanRdfa	true	Scan basic RDFa markup.
includePagesWithoutStructuredData	true	Include HTML pages where no entities are detected.
proxyConfiguration	proxy disabled	Apify Proxy or custom proxy settings.

Example input:

{
    "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://apify.com" }, { "url": "https://docs.apify.com" }],
    "maxPages": 500,
    "maxDepth": 0,
    "sameDomainOnly": true,
    "includePatterns": ["https://apify.com/*"],
    "excludePatterns": ["*/pricing*"],
    "scanJsonLd": true,
    "scanMicrodata": true,
    "scanRdfa": true,
    "includePagesWithoutStructuredData": true,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Start URLs are always eligible. Include and exclude patterns apply to links discovered from them. Obvious non-HTML assets such as images, PDFs, archives, stylesheets, scripts, fonts, and media files are not enqueued.

Output

The Actor writes one Dataset item for each included page. It does not store raw HTML or full JSON-LD payloads.

{
    "url": "https://apify.com/store",
    "finalUrl": "https://apify.com/store",
    "statusCode": 200,
    "depth": 1,
    "title": "Apify Store",
    "structuredData": {
        "jsonLdBlocks": 1,
        "jsonLdEntities": 1,
        "microdataItems": 0,
        "rdfaItems": 0,
        "types": ["WebPage"]
    },
    "issues": [],
    "issueCounts": { "critical": 0, "error": 0, "warning": 0, "info": 0 },
    "valid": true
}

valid is true when the page has no critical or error issues. Warnings and informational findings do not invalidate a page. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

The OUTPUT record contains the run summary:

{
    "scannedUrls": 120,
    "urlsWithStructuredData": 94,
    "urlsWithoutStructuredData": 26,
    "urlsWithIssues": 31,
    "validUrls": 112,
    "invalidUrls": 8,
    "issues": { "critical": 0, "error": 9, "warning": 38, "info": 26 },
    "schemaTypes": { "Article": 18, "Organization": 1, "WebPage": 75 },
    "topIssues": [{ "code": "NO_STRUCTURED_DATA", "count": 26 }],
    "healthScore": 99
}

Data table

Field	Meaning
url, finalUrl	Requested and final response URLs.
statusCode, depth, title	Page response and crawl metadata.
structuredData	Block/item counts and detected type names.
issues	Stable code, severity, category, message, format, property, and source location.
issueCounts	Critical, error, warning, and info totals for the page.
valid	Whether the page has no critical or error issues.

Issue severities are critical, error, warning, and info. Categories are syntax, parse, schema, property, value, consistency, duplicate, conflict, missing, and rendering.

The first rule packs cover Product, Article, BlogPosting, NewsArticle, Organization, LocalBusiness, Person, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, WebSite, WebPage, Event, Recipe, and VideoObject.

How much does it cost to scan structured data?

Cost depends mainly on the number and size of pages, response speed, retries, and proxy use. Cheerio-based HTTP crawling is lightweight compared with browser automation. Start with a small maxPages value, review the run, then scale up. Apify's free plan can be used for small evaluations within its current platform limits; check the Apify pricing page for up-to-date allowances.

Tips and advanced options

• Use several startUrls to audit multiple sites in one run.
• Keep sameDomainOnly enabled for controlled site audits.
• Increase maxDepth above 0 only when you want to discover and scan links from the supplied URLs.
• Narrow large sites with wildcard include patterns, then remove unwanted paths with exclusions.
• Enable a proxy only when the target requires it; proxy use is disabled by default.
• Treat the Structured Data Health Score as a QA indicator, not a search ranking signal. The score starts at 100 and subtracts the average per-page penalty: critical 25, error 10, warning 2, and info 0. It is rounded and clamped to 0-100.

For local development:

npm install
npm start

Run with the Apify CLI:

$apify run

Deploy and run on Apify:

apify login
apify push

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Does this replace Google's Rich Results Test?

No. It is a deterministic structured-data quality scanner, not a Google eligibility, ranking, or rich-results predictor.

What are the current limitations?

The MVP has no JavaScript rendering, complete Schema.org vocabulary reasoning, SHACL validation, remote context resolution, RDF graph inference, cross-page template anomaly detection, or Google-specific rule pack. It scans HTML returned directly by the server.

Is website scanning legal?

You are responsible for complying with applicable laws, website terms, robots policies, access restrictions, and data-protection requirements. Scan only websites you are authorized to access and use considerate limits.

For bugs or feature requests, use the Actor's Issues tab. Custom Website Intelligence integrations and validation rule packs can be developed for specialized workflows.