# Website SEO Audit & Broken Link Checker (`icyanstudio/seo-audit-crawler`) Actor
Crawl a website and audit every page's on-page SEO (title, meta description, headings, canonical, robots, hreflang, Open Graph, JSON-LD, alt text, word count) and check every link for broken pages and redirects. Obeys robots.txt.
- **URL**: https://apify.com/icyanstudio/seo-audit-crawler.md
- **Developed by:** [iCyan Studio](https://apify.com/icyanstudio) (community)
- **Security:** Limited permissions
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet
## Pricing
from $1.00 / 1,000 page auditeds
This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.
Since this Actor supports Apify Store discounts, the price gets lower the higher subscription plan you have.
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
## Website SEO Audit & Broken Link Checker
**Crawl your website, audit every page's on-page SEO and check every link for breakage in one run.** Enter a domain and the actor crawls it breadth-first inside the site, obeying `robots.txt`. It also reads your sitemap, so pages that nothing links to are audited too. For each HTML page you get the title, meta description, headings, canonical, robots directives, hreflang, Open Graph, JSON-LD types, image alt text, word count and response time, plus a list of SEO issues with plain-English messages. Every link on those pages is checked once per run, and each page lists its broken links with their anchor text.
One page or link failing never fails the run. A page that returns 500 is reported as an `http-error`, and a link that times out is reported as broken with the reason. Results come as JSON, CSV or Excel, over the API, or from AI agents through the Apify MCP server.
### What it does
- **Crawls your site politely:** breadth-first from the start URL, same origin by default (or the whole registrable domain with `includeSubdomains`), up to `maxPages` pages and `maxDepth` clicks deep. A start URL that redirects (`example.com` to `www.example.com/en`) brings the target host into scope automatically. It obeys `robots.txt` and its `Crawl-delay`, and never sends more than 2 requests at once to one host.
- **Audits on-page SEO:** title and meta description (with lengths), `h1` texts and `h2` count, canonical (and whether it points at the page itself), robots meta and `X-Robots-Tag`, an `isIndexable` verdict, `html lang`, hreflang alternates, Open Graph, Twitter card, JSON-LD `@type`s (including `@graph`), visible word count, and images without `alt`.
- **Flags issues with stable codes:** `title-missing`, `title-too-long` (> 60), `meta-description-missing`, `meta-description-too-long` (> 160), `h1-missing`, `h1-multiple`, `canonical-invalid`, `canonical-mismatch`, `noindex`, `images-missing-alt`, `broken-links`, `thin-content` (< 200 words), `slow-response` (> 3 s), `http-error`, `html-truncated`.
- **Checks every link once:** HEAD first, GET when a server rejects HEAD. It follows up to 10 redirects and retries 429 and 5xx with backoff. Each unique link is checked once per run and the result is reused on every page that links to it. Links to pages the crawler fetches anyway are not checked a second time, and they cost nothing extra. `mailto:`, `tel:` and `javascript:` links are skipped.
- **Handles real-world HTML:** broken markup, ``, Shift_JIS and other declared charsets, and Chinese and Japanese text (each character counts as a word, so CJK pages aren't all flagged as thin).
### Use cases
- **Technical SEO audits:** find missing or too-long titles and descriptions, missing `h1`s, `noindex` pages and wrong canonicals across a whole site, then sort the **Issues** view.
- **Broken link monitoring:** schedule a weekly run and send pages with `broken-links` to Slack, email or a webhook through Apify integrations.
- **Site migrations:** after a relaunch, see which internal links now redirect or return 404, and on which pages they sit.
- **International SEO:** check `html lang` and hreflang alternates on every language version.
- **Content quality:** find thin pages and images without alt text.
- **AI agents (Apify MCP, LangChain, OpenAI Agents):** a small input and a flat, documented output. An agent can ask "which pages on example.com have SEO problems?" and get structured answers.
### Input
| Field | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| `startUrls` | string\[] | `["https://crawlee.dev"]` | Where the crawl starts: a domain (`example.com`) or a page URL. Up to 100. Start URLs are always audited. |
| `maxPages` | integer 1–10,000 | `10` | Stop after auditing this many HTML pages. This also caps the cost. Set it higher for a full-site audit. |
| `maxDepth` | integer 0–50 | `5` | Clicks from the start URL. `0` audits only the start URLs. Sitemap pages count as depth 1. |
| `checkLinks` | boolean | `true` | Check every link on the audited pages. |
| `checkExternalLinks` | boolean | `true` | Also check links to other websites. |
| `includeSubdomains` | boolean | `false` | Crawl every host of the same registrable domain (`www.`, `blog.`, the bare domain), on http and https. |
| `urlPattern` | regex | none | Crawl only pages whose URL matches (case-insensitive). Links to other pages are still checked. |
| `excludeUrlPattern` | regex | none | Don't crawl pages whose URL matches. Links to them are still checked. |
| `respectRobotsTxt` | boolean | `true` | Obey `robots.txt` rules and `Crawl-delay` (capped at 10 s). Turn it off only for a site you own. |
| `useSitemap` | boolean | `true` | Also queue pages from the sitemap (found through `robots.txt`, or `/sitemap.xml`). |
| `concurrency` | integer 1–20 | `5` | Requests at the same time across all hosts. One host never gets more than 2 at once. |
Example: audit the blog only, without tag and pagination pages:
```json
{
"startUrls": ["https://example.com/blog/"],
"urlPattern": "/blog/",
"excludeUrlPattern": "/tag/|\\?page=",
"maxPages": 500
}
```
Example: a quick on-page audit with no link checks:
```json
{
"startUrls": ["https://example.com"],
"checkLinks": false,
"maxPages": 1000
}
```
### Output
One dataset item per audited page. This one is from a real run on www.icyanstudio.net, 2026-10-25 (shortened). That site renders its content in the browser, so the HTML the server sends has no `h1` and almost no text:
```json
{
"url": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/",
"finalUrl": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/en",
"statusCode": 200,
"depth": 0,
"responseTimeMs": 670,
"title": "iCyan Studio",
"titleLength": 12,
"metaDescription": "Welcome to the iCyan studio. This is a personal website and portfolio to showcase my work, skills, and experience. ...",
"metaDescriptionLength": 290,
"h1": [],
"h2Count": 0,
"canonical": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/en",
"canonicalRaw": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/en",
"canonicalMatches": true,
"robotsMeta": null,
"xRobotsTag": null,
"isIndexable": true,
"lang": "en",
"hreflang": [
{ "lang": "en", "href": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/en" },
{ "lang": "ja", "href": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/ja" },
{ "lang": "zh-TW", "href": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/zh_tw" },
{ "lang": "x-default", "href": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/en" }
],
"og": { "title": "iCyan Studio", "description": "Welcome to the iCyan studio. ...", "image": "https://www.icyanstudio.net/images/icyanstudio.jpg" },
"twitterCard": "summary_large_image",
"jsonLdTypes": [],
"wordCount": 2,
"imagesTotal": 0,
"imagesMissingAlt": 0,
"internalLinks": 0,
"externalLinks": 0,
"brokenLinks": [],
"redirectedLinks": 0,
"linksNotChecked": 0,
"issues": [
{ "code": "meta-description-too-long", "message": "The meta description is 290 characters; search results show about 160." },
{ "code": "h1-missing", "message": "The page has no