🔗 Broken Link Checker

Crawl websites to find broken links, 404 errors, and dead URLs. Essential for SEO audits, website maintenance, and content teams.

Store Quickstart

Start with the Quickstart template (single starting URL, depth 2). For full-site audits, use Deep Crawl (depth 5, up to 500 pages).

Key Features

• 🕸️ Configurable crawl depth — Follows internal links up to 5 levels deep, up to 500 pages per run
• 🌐 Internal + external checks — Validate both your own links and outbound references
• 📍 Anchor text reporting — Identify which link text points to the broken URL
• 🏷️ Error classification — TIMEOUT, DNS_FAILED, CONNECTION_REFUSED, SSL_ERROR
• ⚡ Concurrent fetching — 1-10 parallel requests to speed up crawls
• 📊 Per-page breakdown — Each result shows all broken links grouped by source page

Use Cases

Who	Why
SEO agencies	Regular broken-link audits for client websites to protect ranking
Content editors	Find dead outbound links in blog posts and documentation
E-commerce sites	Monitor product pages for broken navigation and outbound partner links
Site migrations	Validate internal linking after URL restructuring
Technical SEO	Identify redirect chains and crawl traps that waste crawl budget

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	string[]	(required)	URLs to start crawling (max 10)
maxDepth	integer	2	Crawl depth (1-5)
maxPages	integer	50	Max pages to crawl (1-500)
concurrency	integer	5	Parallel requests (1-10)
checkExternal	boolean	true	Check external links
timeoutMs	integer	10000	Request timeout in ms

Input Example

{
  "startUrls": ["https://example.com"],
  "maxDepth": 2,
  "maxPages": 50,
  "concurrency": 5,
  "checkExternal": true
}

Output Example

{
  "url": "https://example.com/blog",
  "brokenLinks": [
    {
      "href": "https://example.com/deleted-page",
      "statusCode": 404,
      "anchorText": "Old announcement",
      "isExternal": false,
      "error": null
    }
  ]
}

FAQ

How does crawl depth work?

Depth 1 = only starting URLs. Depth 2 = starting URLs + links found on them. Depth 5 is the maximum and covers most typical sites.

Does it respect robots.txt?

Yes. Pages blocked by robots.txt are skipped during crawl.

Can I exclude certain URL patterns?

Not in the current version. Add URL pattern exclusion to input if needed in future releases.

How long does a 500-page crawl take?

With concurrency=5 and 10s timeout: roughly 5-15 minutes depending on site speed.

Related Actors

URL/Link Tools cluster — explore related Apify tools:

• 🔗 URL Health Checker — Bulk-check HTTP status codes, redirects, SSL validity, and response times for thousands of URLs.
• 🔗 URL Unshortener — Expand bit.
• 🏷️ Meta Tag Analyzer — Analyze meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD, and hreflang for any URL.
• 📚 Wayback Machine Checker — Check if URLs are archived on the Wayback Machine and find closest snapshots by date.

Cost

Pay Per Event:

• actor-start: $0.01 (flat fee per run)
• dataset-item: $0.005 per output item

Example: 1,000 items = $0.01 + (1,000 × $0.005) = $5.01

No subscription required — you only pay for what you use.