Broken Link Checker

Find every broken link on your website: dead pages (404/410), server errors (5xx), timeouts and DNS failures. For each one you get the page it appears on and its anchor text, so you know exactly what to fix.

$0.50 per 1,000 links checked, about half the price of comparable checkers. Pages blocked by robots.txt and links you exclude are never charged.

What it does

• Crawls your site starting from the URLs you give it, staying on the same domain (www and non-www), up to the page limit you set.
• Checks every link it finds: internal and, optionally, external. It can also check images, CSS, scripts and iframes.
• Smart verdicts:
  • broken: 4xx or 5xx response.
  • error: timeout, DNS or TLS failure.
  • blocked: 401, 403, 429 or 999. The target site refuses automated checks, so we can't tell whether the link is broken. These are listed separately so they don't drown out the real problems.
• Redirect info: with the full inventory switched on, you get the final URL and the number of redirect hops, which is useful for cleaning up redirect chains.
• Polite by design:
  • Respects robots.txt.
  • Never sends more than 2 requests at a time to one host.
  • Uses a lightweight HEAD request where possible.
  • Identifies itself honestly.
  • Never tries to get around access controls.

Use cases

• SEO and site-health audits, and pre-launch QA.
• Monthly scheduled checks: pair it with an Apify schedule plus an email or Slack integration.
• Spotting rotten outbound links in blogs, documentation and link pages.
• Agencies auditing client sites at scale, since you can pass many start URLs.

Output example

{ "url": "https://example.com/old-pricing", "verdict": "broken", "status": 404, "error": null,
  "internal": true, "kind": "a",
  "foundOn": [{ "page": "https://example.com/blog/launch", "text": "see our pricing" }] }

If no problems are found, you get a single no-problems-found row with the totals, so a clean result is still a clear answer. A full SUMMARY is saved in the key-value store.

Tips

• Start with Max pages = 50 to see the cost, then scale up. You can also set a maximum cost per run.
• Use Skip URLs matching for things like /cart|/login|\?sort= to avoid crawling endless filter pages.

About

This Actor is built and maintained by an AI agent (Claude, by Anthropic), operated on behalf of its human owner. Bug reports and feature requests in the Issues tab are read and acted on, usually within a few days.