Broken Link Checker — Recursive Site Crawler

Pricing

Rating

Developer

Actor stats

Categories

Share

Find every broken link on your website. Recursively crawl from any start URL and report all 404 errors, bad redirects, timeouts, and server errors — with the exact page and anchor text where each broken link was found.

Why this exists

Broken links hurt your SEO rankings, frustrate visitors, and make your site look unmaintained. Manually checking links on a 500-page site takes hours. This actor crawls your entire site in minutes, checks every internal and external link, and gives you a structured report.

• Recursive crawling — follows internal links up to a configurable depth, not just one page
• External link checking — lightweight HEAD requests to verify links to other domains
• Status categorization — every link classified as broken (404/410/5xx), redirect (301/302), timeout, or OK
• Severity levels — critical (404, 5xx), warning (redirects, timeouts), info (working links)
• Context — shows which page the broken link was found on and what the anchor text says
• 100 links — try it on your site with zero risk

Quick start

{
"startUrl":"https://example.com",
"maxDepth":3,
"maxPages":500,
"checkExternalLinks":true
}

Hit Start and get a full report in minutes.

Feature comparison

Input

Output

{
"status":"success",
"startUrl":"https://example.com",
"summary":{
"pagesChecked":142,
"linksChecked":1847,
"brokenLinks":12,
"redirects":34,
"errors":3
},
"brokenLinks":[
{
"url":"https://example.com/old-page",
"statusCode":404,
"statusCategory":"broken",
"severity":"critical",
"foundOn":"https://example.com/blog/post-1",
"anchorText":"Learn more",
"lastChecked":"2026-04-13T10:30:00Z",
"error":null
}
]
}

Status categories

Pricing

$0.003 per link checked (pay-per-event pricing).

• Only charged on successful runs — errors and dry runs are never charged.
• 500 links = $1.50
• 2,000 links = $6.00

Performance

• Uses CheerioCrawler (pure HTTP) — no headless browser overhead
• Default concurrency handled by Crawlee's built-in request queue
• External links checked with parallel HEAD requests (batches of 20)
• Typical: 200–500 links/minute depending on target site response time
• 10-second timeout per request, 1 retry on failure

Limitations

• JavaScript-rendered links are not detected. This actor uses HTTP requests only (CheerioCrawler), not a headless browser. Links injected by JavaScript after page load will be missed.
• Some sites aggressively block crawlers. If you see many timeouts, try reducing maxConcurrency or disabling checkExternalLinks.
• External links are checked with HEAD requests only. Some servers respond differently to HEAD vs GET — a HEAD 404 does not always mean GET would also 404.
• Maximum 10,000 pages per run to prevent runaway costs.

Related actors in this suite

Other tools by accurate_pouch for web intelligence + automation:

• TheCrawler — Web scraper + LLM-powered structured extraction. AGPL-3.0, also on npm (thecrawler@0.1.1). $0.005/page.
• Sitemap Analyzer — Parse and validate XML sitemaps, status-check every URL, handle sitemap indexes. $0.004/sitemap.
• Website Change Monitor — Track page changes via text, hash, or CSS selector; diff + webhook on change. $0.005/page.
• Lighthouse Auditor — PageSpeed Insights API, Core Web Vitals, deltas, competitor comparison, Sheets export. $0.005/audit.
• Tech Stack Detector — 7,517 signatures across 105 categories, implies chains. $0.02/URL.

Run on Apify

👁 Run on Apify

No setup needed. Click above to run in the cloud. $0.003 per operation.