Broken Link Checker – Crawl a Website for 404s

Broken Link Checker crawls a website from a start URL, collects every link on every internal page, and checks them all. It returns each broken link (404, 410, 5xx, DNS errors, timeouts) together with the page it was found on and its anchor text, so you know exactly what to fix and where.

Internal pages on the same host are crawled (up to maxPages); external links are checked but not crawled. It uses plain HTTP requests (no browser), which keeps it fast and cheap.

What can you use it for?

Find broken links on your website

Run it on your homepage and get a fix list of every dead internal and outbound link.

404 checker for SEO audits

Broken links waste crawl budget and hurt user experience. Schedule a weekly run and catch new 404s early.

Check outbound / external links

Find links to other sites that have gone dead, been moved, or no longer resolve.

Site migration QA

Crawl the new site after launch and find links still pointing to removed pages.

Full link inventory

Turn off onlyBroken to export every checked link with its status code.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start).
2. Enter your input (see the example below) and click Save & Start.
3. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or read them via the API.

Input

• startUrl — Homepage or section to start from. Only pages on the same host are crawled.
• maxPages — Max internal pages to crawl (default 200).
• checkExternal — Also check links to other domains (default on; they are checked, not crawled).
• onlyBroken — Output only broken links (default on). Turn off to output every checked link.
• concurrency — Parallel requests (default 10, max 50).

Example input:

{
  "startUrl": "https://books.toscrape.com",
  "maxPages": 30,
  "checkExternal": true,
  "onlyBroken": true
}

Output example

Example below: one Wikipedia page (maxPages: 1) produced 35 broken outbound links like these.

link	status	broken	error	foundOn	anchorText
https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2009/11/geocities	404	True		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities	"Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities"
https://money.cnn.com/1999/01/28/technology/yahoo_a/	503	True		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities	the original
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=173652		True	ENOTFOUND	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities	the original

All output fields: link, status, broken, error, foundOn, anchorText, internal. If nothing is broken you get a single row with a note such as No broken links among 453 checked.

How much does it cost?

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. You pay only for results, not for servers or subscriptions:

• $0.001 per link checked, which is $1.00 per 1,000 links
• plus Apify's standard Actor start event of $0.00005 per run (per GB of memory; the default 1 GB memory = one event)

You process	You pay (approx.)
500 links	$0.50
1,000 links	$1.00
10,000 links	$10.00

Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit, which is enough to try this Actor at no cost.

Run it via API, schedule or AI agents

Run from your own code with the Apify API, JavaScript or Python client, schedule it in Apify Console, connect it to Make, Zapier, n8n or Google Sheets, or let an AI agent call it through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com).

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/quillbit-tools~broken-link-crawler/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrl": "https://books.toscrape.com", "maxPages": 30, "checkExternal": true, "onlyBroken": true}'

FAQ

What counts as broken? No response (DNS error, connection error, timeout) or an HTTP status of 400 or higher, except 401, 403, 429 and 999, which usually mean "login required" or "bot blocked" rather than a dead page.

What am I charged for? One link-checked event per unique link checked (crawled pages included), whether it is broken or not. A 30-page site with 450 links costs about $0.45. Use maxPages to cap the cost.

Does it check images, PDFs or other files? It checks <a href> links of any type, including PDFs and images that are linked, but it does not crawl into them. <img src> and scripts are not checked.

Does it render JavaScript? No. Links must be in the HTML the server returns. Sites that build their navigation purely in JavaScript will show fewer links.

Can I schedule it? Yes. Save it as a task and add a schedule in Apify Console, then get results by email, webhook, Slack or Google Sheets integrations.

Related tools by Quillbit Tools

• Bulk URL Status & Redirect Chain Checker
• Sitemap URL Extractor
• Domain Expiry, DNS & SSL Certificate Checker
• Website Tech Stack Detector
• Webpage to Markdown for LLMs & RAG
• RSS & Atom Feed to JSON Reader

Questions or a feature request? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab.