Broken Link Checker: 404s, Redirect Chains & Sitemaps

Find every broken link on a website: 404 and 410 pages, server errors, dead domains, redirect chains and loops, broken images, scripts and stylesheets, plus sitemap errors (sitemap URLs that redirect, return 404, are noindex or are linked from nowhere). Give it your home page and get one row per problem, with the page it was found on and its anchor text, so you know exactly what to fix.

It is a fast HTTP crawler (no browser): it reads your pages, checks each unique link once (HEAD, then GET when a server refuses HEAD), follows redirects one by one to show the full chain, and respects robots.txt. You pay per page crawled, all link checks included.

Typical uses

• SEO audits: broken internal links, 404s, redirect chains and noindex pages before they cost you rankings and crawl budget.
• Site migrations and redesigns: run it after a launch to catch links still pointing to old URLs (301 chains) or to pages that no longer exist.
• Sitemap checks: find sitemap URLs that redirect, return errors, are noindex, or are not linked from any page (orphan pages).
• Agencies and freelancers: audit client sites in bulk (up to 100 websites per run) and feed the results to Google Sheets or a report.
• Monitoring: schedule a weekly run and get alerted when a new broken link appears.

What you get for each problem link

Field	Description
issueType	broken (4xx, 5xx, dead domain, SSL error, redirect loop), redirect (works, but through 301/302...), blocked (401/403/429/999: the server refuses automated checks, verify by hand), timeout
statusCode, error	Final HTTP status after redirects, or the network error (Domain not found (DNS lookup failed), Redirect loop, ...)
linkUrl, linkType, anchorText	The link, its kind (a, img, script, css, sitemap, start) and its text (or image alt)
sourcePage	The page where the link was found (for sitemap rows, the sitemap file)
isInternal, isNofollow, occurrences	Same website or not, rel="nofollow", how many times it appears on that page
finalUrl, redirectCount, redirectChain	Where redirects end and each step as {url, statusCode}
contentType, responseTimeMs, checkedWith	Content type, response time, HEAD or GET
site, observedAt	The website checked and when (UTC)

Missing values are null, never guessed. A site where nothing is wrong gets one free marker row (found: false) saying so.

Run summary (OUTPUT), per website: pages crawled, unique links checked (internal and external), broken links by status code, top broken links by number of pages, redirecting links and chains longer than one hop, blocked and timed-out links, robots.txt status, sitemaps read and their URL counts, sitemap URLs not linked from any page (when the whole site was crawled), noindex pages, and why the crawl stopped.

Input

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.example.com/" }],
  "maxPages": 500,
  "reportRedirects": "all",
  "checkExternalLinks": true,
  "checkResources": true,
  "useSitemaps": true
}

• startUrls: one or more websites (up to 100). Links on the same domain are followed, www. included; other domains are checked, never crawled. A URL ending in .xml is read as a sitemap.
• maxPages: HTML pages to crawl per website, 1 to 10,000 (default 200). Each page is billed once, whatever its number of links.
• reportRedirects: all (default), internal (only redirects on your site) or none (broken links only).
• checkExternalLinks, checkResources: also check links to other sites, and image/script/stylesheet URLs (both on by default).
• useSitemaps: read the sitemaps listed in robots.txt (or /sitemap.xml), crawl their URLs too and report sitemap problems.
• Advanced: reportAllLinks (one row per link, working ones included), excludeUrlPatterns (ignore URLs containing a text, e.g. /tag/), respectRobotsTxt, maxConcurrency (requests in parallel to your site, default 4), requestTimeoutSecs (default 15).

Output example

Two real rows from a run on 2026-10-07 on the-internet.herokuapp.com, a public test site full of deliberate errors (a broken image, and an internal link that redirects):

[
  {
    "found": true,
    "site": "the-internet.herokuapp.com",
    "sourcePage": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/broken_images",
    "linkUrl": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/asdf.jpg",
    "linkType": "img",
    "anchorText": null,
    "issueType": "broken",
    "statusCode": 404,
    "error": null,
    "isInternal": true,
    "isNofollow": false,
    "occurrences": 1,
    "finalUrl": null,
    "redirectCount": 0,
    "redirectChain": [],
    "contentType": "text/html",
    "responseTimeMs": 26,
    "checkedWith": "GET",
    "observedAt": "2026-10-07T15:18:52.606Z",
    "schemaVersion": "1.0"
  },
  {
    "found": true,
    "site": "the-internet.herokuapp.com",
    "sourcePage": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/",
    "linkUrl": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/notification_message",
    "linkType": "a",
    "anchorText": "Notification Messages",
    "issueType": "redirect",
    "statusCode": 200,
    "error": null,
    "isInternal": true,
    "isNofollow": false,
    "occurrences": 1,
    "finalUrl": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/notification_message_rendered",
    "redirectCount": 1,
    "redirectChain": [
      {
        "url": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/notification_message",
        "statusCode": 303
      },
      {
        "url": "https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/notification_message_rendered",
        "statusCode": 200
      }
    ],
    "contentType": "text/html",
    "responseTimeMs": 40,
    "checkedWith": "HEAD",
    "observedAt": "2026-10-07T15:18:52.606Z",
    "schemaVersion": "1.0"
  }
]

Pricing

Pay per page crawled, no subscription, no fee per run, no proxy costs. One event per HTML page of your site, with every link on it checked (internal, external, images, scripts, stylesheets): see the Pricing tab, cheaper on higher Apify plans. For comparison, a 500-page site costs about $0.50 on the Bronze plan, however many links it has.

Free: result rows, link checks, redirects, broken internal URLs, PDFs and other non-HTML files, sitemap reading and the run summary. The run never spends more than the maximum cost you set: it stops crawling cleanly and keeps everything found so far.

Free Apify plan: up to 50 crawled pages per run, so you can check the output. A paid Apify plan removes this limit.

Use it from code, automations or AI agents

API (one call, results returned directly):

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/plainrows~broken-link-checker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.example.com/"}], "maxPages": 100}'

n8n, Make, Zapier: use the Apify integration, pick plainrows/broken-link-checker, and send new broken links to Slack, Google Sheets or your ticketing tool. Schedule it weekly in Apify to monitor a site.

AI agents (MCP): add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=plainrows/broken-link-checker to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client. The agent gets a typed tool and pays per page crawled.

What this is not

• Not a browser. Links added by JavaScript after the page loads are not seen; pages that only render with JavaScript show few links. Most sites (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, static and server-rendered sites) are fully covered.
• No login. Pages behind a login are not crawled; links to them show as blocked (401/403).
• blocked is not broken. Sites such as LinkedIn, Stack Overflow or some shops refuse automated requests (403, 429, 999). They are listed separately so they don't drown real errors; check them in a browser if they matter.
• Not a full SEO suite: no page titles audit, no Core Web Vitals, no keyword data.

Good to know

• Polite by default: at most 4 parallel requests to your site (adjustable), 3 to any other site, robots.txt rules and crawl-delay respected (up to 5 s) for crawling. Links to pages disallowed by robots.txt are still checked once, like a visitor clicking them. A robots.txt that answers with a server error (5xx) means no page of that host is crawled, as RFC 9309 requires: retry later, or set respectRobotsTxt to false for your own site.
• Each unique URL is checked once per run, even if hundreds of pages link to it; a domain that does not exist is not retried for every link.
• The User-Agent is PlainRowsLinkChecker/1.0: allow it in your firewall if your own site blocks bots.

Run summary

Each run stores the summary described above in the key-value store (OUTPUT), with per-site counts, top broken links, sitemap and noindex findings, and why the crawl stopped (all pages crawled, maxPages reached, maximum cost reached, free plan limit, run time limit, no HTML page reachable, too many URLs that are not pages: the crawl stops when far more URLs turn out to be files or broken pages, which are free, than pages crawled).

FAQ

How do I find broken links on my website? Enter your home page in startUrls and run: one row per problem (404, server error, dead domain, redirect chain or loop, broken image or script), with the page it was found on.

How many pages does it crawl? 1 to 10,000 HTML pages per website (maxPages, default 200). Each crawled page is billed once, whatever its number of links.

Does it check links to other websites? Yes, with checkExternalLinks (on by default): other domains are checked, never crawled.

Does it check my sitemap? Yes, with useSitemaps: sitemap URLs that redirect, return 404, are noindex or are linked from nowhere are reported.

Why are some links marked blocked? Some sites refuse automated requests (403, 429, 999). They are listed apart from real errors so you can check them by hand.

More PlainRows tools

Same pay-per-result pricing, same clean JSON, built to chain together in n8n, Make, Zapier or AI agents.

• SEO and keywords: Keyword Search Volume, CPC & Difficulty · Keyword Ideas Generator · Google Autocomplete & People Also Ask · Google Trends Explorer · Website Organic Traffic & Top Keywords · Bulk Domain Authority Checker · Backlink Checker · AI Search Visibility Tracker (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode) · Google Maps Rank Tracker (Geo-Grid Local SEO)
• Leads and companies: Google Maps Scraper · Website Technology Checker · ATS Jobs Scraper (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby) · Google Jobs Scraper · Google Ads Scraper (Transparency Center) · Company Registry Lookup (SIRENE, LEI, Brreg) · Public Tenders Search (EU TED & UK)
• E-commerce and travel: Amazon Product Search Scraper · Google Shopping Prices Scraper · Google Hotels Prices Scraper · Tripadvisor Reviews Scraper
• Content and media: Google News Scraper · YouTube Search Scraper · YouTube Comments Scraper · Google Images Scraper · Website Screenshot API · Google Maps Reviews Scraper · App Store & Google Play Reviews Scraper

Support

Missing a check or found a false positive? Open an issue on this page. Issues are read and answered.