Broken Link Checker: 404s, 5xx & Redirect Chains (robots.txt)

Point it at your own website and get a full link-health report in minutes:

• Broken links: 404 / 410 and other 4xx, 5xx server errors, timeouts, dead domains (DNS), connection failures
• Redirects: every hop of each redirect chain (301 → 302 → 200), redirect loops, HTTPS → HTTP downgrades
• Where to fix it: the page each broken link was found on, plus its anchor text
• External links to other sites verified too (free), with bot-walled responses (401/403/429/999) marked ACCESS_RESTRICTED instead of falsely "broken"
• Optional checks for images, scripts, stylesheets, iframes and canonical URLs
• A ready-to-share CSV of every broken link (BROKEN_LINKS_CSV in the key-value store) and a run SUMMARY

It behaves like a polite search-engine crawler: it reads and obeys robots.txt (including Crawl-delay) for every host it contacts, identifies itself as ApifyBrokenLinkChecker, and caps parallel requests.

Use cases

• SEO audits: fix 404s and redirect chains that waste crawl budget and link equity
• Site migrations and redesigns: schedule weekly and catch regressions before visitors do
• Agencies: one report per client site, exported to Sheets or Slack
• Docs and blogs: find outbound links that rotted years ago

Input

Field	Default	Notes
startUrls	—	A site you own or manage. www and non-www count as one site
maxPages	500	URLs on your site to request (up to 20,000)
maxDepth	10	Clicks from the start page
checkExternalLinks	true	HEAD, then GET fallback
maxExternalLinks	500	Distinct external URLs
checkAssets	false	img/script/css/iframe/canonical
includeSubdomains	false	Crawl *.yoursite.com too
excludeUrlPatterns	—	Substrings or globs to skip
maxConcurrency	5	Crawl-delay in robots.txt wins

Output

One dataset row per checked URL (your pages, assets and external links):

{
  "url": "https://example.com/old-pricing", "type": "page", "depth": 2,
  "foundOn": "https://example.com/blog/launch", "anchorText": "see our pricing",
  "statusCode": 404, "finalUrl": "https://example.com/pricing-2024",
  "redirectChain": [{"url": "https://example.com/old-pricing", "statusCode": 301}],
  "redirectCount": 1, "responseTimeMs": 182, "linksFound": 0,
  "issues": ["BROKEN_4XX", "REDIRECT"], "error": null
}

Issue codes: BROKEN_4XX, SERVER_ERROR_5XX, TIMEOUT, DNS_FAILED, CONNECT_FAILED, REDIRECT, REDIRECT_CHAIN, REDIRECT_LOOP, TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS, HTTPS_TO_HTTP_REDIRECT, ACCESS_RESTRICTED, BLOCKED_BY_ROBOTS, ROBOTS_TXT_UNAVAILABLE, URL_NOT_ALLOWED, PAGE_TRUNCATED.

Key-value store: SUMMARY (totals), BROKEN_LINKS (JSON) and BROKEN_LINKS_CSV: one line per source page → broken URL pair.

Pricing (pay per event)

• $0.50 per 1,000 pages (page-crawled, $0.0005 per URL on your site that responded), plus the standard $0.00005 actor start.
• Free: external link checks, URLs skipped by robots.txt or your exclude patterns, and requests that got no response at all.
• Respects your run's maximum cost, so a 10,000-page site never costs more than you set.

Fair use

• Crawl only websites you own or are authorized to audit. The crawl never leaves the start site (except single checks of external links).
• robots.txt is always honored. A robots.txt that returns a 5xx error is treated as "disallow all", per RFC 9309. To let this checker into areas you block for other bots, add User-agent: ApifyBrokenLinkChecker rules.
• mailto: and tel: links are ignored, and no contact data is collected. Private-network addresses are blocked.

---

Actively maintained. Issues answered within 24 hours on the Issues tab.