Broken Link Checker API — SEO Crawl, Assets & Change Monitor

Why use this Actor?

Broken link checker and technical SEO crawler for dead links, 4xx/5xx errors, redirects, assets, canonicals and hreflang. Crawl sites or sitemaps, check URLs concurrently, flag slow responses, rank issues, and persist snapshots to surface new, regressed, resolved and changed links.

Features

• Start URLs — Public website pages to crawl for links. Optional when checkUrls or sitemapUrls are supplied.
• Maximum pages — Maximum number of HTML pages to crawl across the run.
• Maximum unique links — Maximum number of unique HTTP/HTTPS links to check.
• Crawl same domain only — When enabled, discovered pages are crawled only on the starting hostname; external links are still checked.
• Include healthy 2xx links — Include healthy 2xx link rows in the dataset; otherwise the output focuses on redirects and problems.
• Request timeout seconds — Maximum seconds allowed for each network request.
• User agent — HTTP User-Agent header sent to target websites.
• URLs to check directly — Optional URL list to validate without crawling source pages.
• Sitemap URLs to import — Optional XML sitemap URLs whose
• Maximum redirect hops — Follow and report complete redirect chains up to this limit.
• Link check concurrency — Parallel HTTP link checks after discovery.
• Check page assets — Also validate images, JavaScript, stylesheets, media, source and iframe URLs discovered on crawled pages.

Use cases

• Technical seo audits.
• Site migrations.
• Content qa.
• Recurring 404 and redirect monitoring.

Example input

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://example.com"
  ],
  "maxPages": 200,
  "maxLinks": 5000,
  "sameDomainOnly": true,
  "includeOk": false,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 20
}

Pricing & cost control

Use the bounded input limits and filters to keep runs predictable. Pay-per-result Actors only charge primary result rows; summary, status and monitoring metadata are designed to add context without inflating result volume.

FAQ

What is this Actor for?
It is designed for technical SEO audits, site migrations, content QA.

Can I run it on a schedule?
Yes. You can schedule Actor runs on Apify and send the resulting dataset into automations, webhooks, storage, or downstream APIs.

How do I control cost and run size?
Use the input limits and filters shown in the Actor input form. The Actor applies bounded defaults and hard caps so large jobs remain predictable.

Search keywords

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Crawl one or more public websites and find broken links, redirects, HTTP errors, and unreachable URLs. The Actor is designed for technical SEO checks, website migrations, QA, content audits, monitoring pipelines, and agency reporting.

What it checks

The Actor discovers HTTP/HTTPS links from HTML pages, deduplicates them, checks each URL with a lightweight HEAD request and automatically falls back to GET when a server rejects HEAD. Results include source page, target URL, HTTP status, state, redirect target when exposed, whether the link is internal, error text, and timestamps.

Reliability and cost controls

Crawling is bounded by maxPages and maxLinks. Requests have explicit timeouts, non-HTTP links are ignored, fragments are removed before deduplication, and duplicate targets are checked only once per run. Multi-page crawls keep going when individual pages or targets fail.

By default only redirects and problematic links are emitted. Enable includeOk when you want a full link inventory.

Input example

{"startUrls":["https://example.com"],"maxPages":50,"maxLinks":1000,"sameDomainOnly":true,"includeOk":false,"requestTimeoutSecs":20}

Output

link_check rows contain the individual checks. page_error rows describe a source page that could not be crawled. A final summary row reports pages scanned and unique links checked.

Pricing

Target launch price is $0.00065 per checked emitted link plus the small Actor start event. Healthy links suppressed by the default includeOk=false setting are checked but are not emitted/billed as result rows, making the default mode efficient for finding issues.

Responsible use

Use this Actor only on public websites and respect applicable terms, robots policies, rate limits, and legal requirements. Keep crawl limits reasonable for the target site.

Support

For reproducible problems provide the public start URL, relevant input settings and Apify run ID. Never include secrets or private credentials.

Extended capabilities

• Crawl HTML links, direct URL lists, and XML sitemap targets with redirect-chain reporting.
• Optionally validate assets, canonical URLs, and hreflang targets.
• Flag slow responses, multi-hop redirects, broken assets, and sitemap-only internal orphan candidates.