Backlink Finder for Wikipedia

Find every Wikipedia article that links to your site, then see which of those links still work. The Actor asks Wikipedia's official API for all external links pointing at your domain, in any language edition you choose, and checks each linked URL on your live site today:

• live: the URL answers 200 (a redirect to the same page over https or with a trailing slash still counts as live)
• redirected: it redirects to a different page that answers 200
• redirected-to-homepage: it redirects to the homepage, which usually means the content is gone
• broken: the URL answers 404 or 410
• error: 5xx, a timeout, a redirect loop or a network error
• not-checked: robots.txt disallows the URL, or the link is not http(s)

Why use it

Links from Wikipedia send steady referral traffic, and editors remove or tag dead links. A broken link from a Wikipedia article is usually fixed on your side with one redirect. Use this Actor after a migration or redesign, as a routine check, or to see which of your pages Wikipedia cites and how often.

Input

• Domains: one or more domains, e.g. example.com. www. is folded into the bare domain.
• Wikis: language codes such as en, de, fr, ja, or Wikimedia hosts such as commons.wikimedia.org and en.wikivoyage.org. Default: en.
• Include subdomains: also list links to docs.example.com, blog.example.com and so on.
• Max backlinks per domain (default 1000): the cap across all wikis.
• Check linked URLs on the live site (default on): turn off to only list the backlinks.

{ "domains": ["nodejs.org"], "wikis": ["en", "de"] }

Output

One dataset row per article and linked URL:

{
  "domain": "nodejs.org",
  "wiki": "en.wikipedia.org",
  "articleTitle": "Node.js",
  "articleUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js",
  "pageId": 26415635,
  "linkedUrl": "https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/dont-block-the-event-loop/",
  "status": "broken",
  "finalUrl": "https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/dont-block-the-event-loop/",
  "finalStatus": 404,
  "hops": 0,
  "note": null,
  "archivedCopyUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/dont-block-the-event-loop/",
  "articlesLinkingToUrl": 1,
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-29T08:00:00.000Z"
}

Each linked URL is checked once, however many articles link to it. articlesLinkingToUrl shows how many articles in the run cite it, so you can fix the most-cited URLs first. archivedCopyUrl opens the latest Wayback Machine copy, so you can see what used to be there.

Key-value store records:

• BROKEN_LINKS: the broken URLs, each followed by a tab and the article that links to it, one per line. Map them to new targets and check the result with our Redirect Map Validator.
• OUTPUT: per-domain counts for each status, per-wiki totals, and whether each list was complete or hit your cap.

How it works

1. It calls the MediaWiki API (list=exturlusage) on each wiki, for articles only (main namespace), paging through all results. Requests are sequential, identify the Actor in the User-Agent and use maxlag, following Wikimedia's API etiquette.
2. Links to other hosts are dropped unless Include subdomains is on.
3. Each unique linked URL is requested on your live site. Redirects are followed one hop at a time (up to 10). No page bodies are downloaded, only status codes and headers.

How it behaves on your site

• It identifies itself as WikipediaBacklinkFinder/1.0 and obeys robots.txt for that agent (or *), including Crawl-delay up to 10 s per host. Turn Respect robots.txt off only for sites you own or are authorised to test.
• It collects no personal data. It reads only article titles, page IDs and URLs, plus status codes from your site. User pages and talk pages are not searched.

Pricing

Pay per event: each backlink returned (one article linking to one URL) is one backlink-found event. Use Max backlinks per domain and the run's maximum cost setting to cap spend. The run stops cleanly when the cap is reached.

Limitations

• Wikipedia's link table only covers links in article wikitext and templates. A few links added by Lua modules or Wikidata at render time are not listed.
• Very popular domains have hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia links. Raise the cap or narrow the domain to a subdomain for full coverage.
• A page that returns 200 with "not found" content (a soft 404) shows as live.
• If the Wikimedia API is down for one wiki, that wiki shows an error in OUTPUT, and the other wikis still run.

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. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation.