Broken Link Checker - Find 404s, Redirects & Dead Links

Crawl any page's links and instantly find broken links (404s), redirects, timeouts and error status codes. Point the Broken Link Checker at one or more page URLs, and it extracts every <a href> link, resolves it to an absolute URL, and checks its live HTTP status. You get one clean row per link with its status code, a broken flag, redirect target, anchor text and whether the link is internal or external — perfect for SEO audits, site maintenance, QA and link-rot detection. No login, no API key.

Why use this Broken Link Checker?

• Find broken links fast - every link with a status >= 400 (404, 410, 500...) or a request error/timeout is flagged broken: true.
• Catch silent redirects - see which links now 301/302 elsewhere and where they land (redirect_to), so you can update them before they rot.
• SEO-ready output - status_code, ok, broken, is_internal, anchor_text per link, ready for Google Sheets, Excel, CSV or JSON.
• Cheap & predictable - HEAD requests first (GET fallback on 405), caps on links-per-page and total items keep runs fast and low-cost.
• Datacenter-friendly - runs on the URLs you give it, no proxies required to get started.

Use cases

• SEO audits - hunt down 404s and dead outbound links that hurt rankings and crawl budget.
• Site maintenance - regularly re-check key pages so link rot never goes unnoticed.
• QA / pre-release checks - validate that every link on a landing page, docs page or blog post resolves.
• Link rot detection - monitor reference-heavy pages (wikis, resource lists, documentation) for links that have gone stale.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	check	Operating mode. check = page URLs -> checked links.
urls	array	["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"]	Page URLs to crawl for links.
checkExternal	boolean	true	Also check links to other domains. Disable for on-site-only audits.
maxLinksPerPage	integer	200	Max unique links to extract & check per page.
maxItems	integer	500	Max checked links (dataset items) in total.

Example input

{
  "mode": "check",
  "urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"],
  "checkExternal": true,
  "maxLinksPerPage": 200,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Output

One dataset item per checked link:

{
  "source_page": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
  "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThisPageDoesNotExist",
  "anchor_text": "dead link",
  "status_code": 404,
  "ok": false,
  "broken": true,
  "redirected": false,
  "redirect_to": null,
  "is_internal": true,
  "error": null,
  "source": "broken-link-checker",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-21T16:00:00+00:00"
}

Field	Description
source_page	The page the link was found on.
url	Absolute URL of the link target.
anchor_text	Visible anchor text of the <a>.
status_code	HTTP status code (null if the request failed).
ok	True when status is 200-399.
broken	True when status >= 400 or the request errored/timed out.
redirected	True when the final URL differs from the requested one.
redirect_to	Final URL after following redirects.
is_internal	True when the link's host matches the source page.
error	Error message if the request failed.
source	Always broken-link-checker.
scraped_at	UTC ISO-8601 timestamp.

Pricing

Pay per usage. Checking links is lightweight (HEAD requests), so runs are cheap — roughly $0.5 per 1,000 checked links depending on page size and response times. Use maxLinksPerPage and maxItems to cap spend.

Related actors

• SEO On-Page Auditor
• Website Link Extractor
• Sitemap URL Extractor
• Redirect Chain Tracer

FAQ

Does it crawl the whole site? No — it checks the links found on the exact page URLs you supply. Feed it many URLs (or pair it with the Sitemap URL Extractor) to cover a whole site.

Does it need a proxy? No. It operates on the URLs you provide and is datacenter-friendly. For sites that aggressively block bots, add a proxy.

What counts as broken? Any link returning HTTP >= 400, or one that times out / errors before a response arrives.

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Keywords: broken link checker, 404 checker, dead link finder, link checker, redirect checker, SEO audit tool, link rot, website link checker, broken link finder, HTTP status checker, site maintenance, QA links, crawl links, check links.