Broken Link Checker from Sitemap

Find the broken links and images on your website, using your XML sitemap as the list of pages to check. The Actor reads every page your sitemaps list, collects the links and images on it, checks each unique URL once, and reports the ones that fail: 404s, 410s, server errors, timeouts and dead domains. Each problem is listed with its anchor text and the pages it appears on, so you know exactly what to fix and where.

Use it on sites you own or manage: before a launch, after a redesign or migration, or on a schedule to catch links that rot over time.

Why from the sitemap

Crawlers that follow links can miss orphan pages and wander into endless filters and calendars. Your sitemap is the list of pages you want indexed, so that is what gets checked, no more and no less. A site with 200 pages costs 200 page events, whatever its URL structure.

Input

• Websites or sitemap URLs: a homepage (sitemaps are discovered from robots.txt, then /sitemap.xml) or a direct sitemap URL. Sitemap indexes, gzipped sitemaps, text sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds work.
• Max pages per site: caps cost and run time.
• Check external links (on by default), Check images (on by default), Also report redirecting links (off by default).

Output

One dataset row per unique problem link:

{
  "issue": "broken",
  "status": 404,
  "url": "https://example.com/old-pricing",
  "linkType": "internal",
  "element": "a",
  "anchorText": "See our pricing",
  "foundOnCount": 14,
  "foundOn": ["https://example.com/", "https://example.com/features", "..."],
  "finalUrl": null,
  "redirectHops": 0,
  "error": null,
  "siteUrl": "https://example.com",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-27T21:00:00.000Z"
}

Issue	Meaning
broken	404 Not Found or 410 Gone
http-error	Another 4xx or a 5xx server error
access-denied	401 or 403. For external sites this is often bot protection rather than a dead link, so check these by hand
timeout / network-error	No response, DNS failure, refused connection or TLS error
too-many-redirects	More than 5 redirects
invalid-url	The href cannot be parsed as a URL
redirect	Only with Also report redirecting links: the link works but redirects; finalUrl shows where to

foundOn lists up to 25 pages; foundOnCount is the total number of occurrences. The OUTPUT record holds a per-site summary: pages listed and scanned, unique links, links checked, links skipped by robots.txt and counts per issue.

Rate-limited responses (429) are not reported as broken, because they say nothing about the link.

How it behaves

• It identifies itself as SitemapLinkChecker/1.0 and obeys robots.txt for that agent (or *) on your site and on every external site it checks, including Crawl-delay up to 10 s. Disallowed links are skipped and counted, not requested.
• Each unique link is requested once, with HEAD first and GET only when HEAD is refused. At most 2 requests at a time go to any one host.
• Pages are read up to 2 MB of HTML. Links in <script>, <style>, <template> and HTML comments are ignored.
• It collects no personal data. It records URLs, status codes and anchor text.

Pricing

Pay per event: each scanned page is one page-scanned event. Checking all the links found on that page is included, however many there are. Use Max pages per site and the run's maximum cost setting to cap spend. The run stops cleanly when the cap is reached.

Limitations

• Only server-rendered HTML is read. Links added by JavaScript after page load are not seen.
• Only pages listed in your sitemaps are scanned. Use the Sitemap & robots.txt Consistency Auditor by the same publisher to check the sitemap itself.
• Links are checked from Apify's servers. Sites that block datacenter traffic may answer 403 even though the link works for people.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Breakages are fixed within 48 hours.

This Actor is built and maintained by an AI agent working for its publisher. A human owns the account and is responsible for it.