What does Broken Links Checker do?

Our Broken Links Checker is an easy-to-use SEO tool to help you keep your UX and SEO score healthy, improve your website ranking, and prevent link rot.

How does it check for broken links?

Broken Link Checker can crawl any website and do all of the following:

• generate a report containing an inspection of all links on the website or only broken links
• scan one or multiple websites simultaneously
• easily check domain and subdomains
• identify broken link fragments
• give you a neat report in your email inbox once the SEO inspection is complete
• initiate a SEO check manually or automatically thanks to our powerful scheduling system

How much does it cost to run Broken Links Checker?

Using our basic plan, the scraper's run will cost you around USD 0.25 in Apify platform credits per 1,000 scraped results. For more details about the plans we offer, platform credits and usage, see the platform pricing page.

How to start Broken Links Checker

Broken Links Checker is highly adaptable to your SEO requests and can scan your web pages quickly and regularly. To check a website for bad links, repeat the following steps:

1. Click on Try for free.
2. Add one or more website URLs to start the audit from.
3. Enable the Save only broken links button.
4. Add your email address to receive the full SEO report in your inbox.
5. Click Run and wait for the data to be collected.
6. Optional step: Schedule the tool to check the links automatically every month, week or specific time during the day.

For a more detailed instruction with visual aids of how to set up a broken links checker and why, see our step-by-step tutorial on checking for broken links.

What's happening under the hood?

Broken Links Checker will start the link check at a given URL and will crawl all linked pages under that website. So for example, if the crawler starts at https://www.example.com/something, then it will also crawl linked pages such as:

https://www.example.com/something/index.html
https://www.example.com/something/else
https://www.example.com/something/even/more/deeper/file.html

On every checked page, the crawler will also analyze whether links to other pages are working or not. For example, if the page contains a link to https://www.example.com/another/page#anchor, the actor will open the inspected page https://www.example.com/another/page, check whether it loads correctly and then it also check if it contains the #anchor.

Input options

If this actor is run on the Apify platform, our user-friendly UI will help you configure all the necessary and optional parameters of this scraper before running it. Our Broken Links Checker recognizes the following input fields:

Website URL The initial URL to start the broken links inspection from.

Max pages Use this field to set the maximum number of pages to be checked. If left empty, the number will be unlimited.

Notification emails Add the email address to receive a notification after the crawler discovers all broken links.

Save only broken links If set to true, you'll get only the broken links in the report. If set to false, the crawler will include into the report both broken and healthy links (not a CSV friendly option).

Crawl subdomains If set to true, the crawler will search broken links not only on the main page but also in deeper subdomains.

For more technical details on the input, head over to the Input tab.

Input example

Here's an input example for checking the Apify Blog for bad links. We've enabled the crawler to check subdomains as well but limited the inspection to 1,000 pages.

    {
      "baseUrl": "https://blog.apify.com",
      "maxPages": 1000,
      "notificationEmails": [
        "[email protected]"
      ],
      "saveOnlyBrokenLinks": true,
      "crawlSubdomains": true
    }

Output

Once the links checker finishes the crawl, it will save a report of the broken links into your key-value store. You will find reports in two formats there:

• OUTPUT contains a machine-readable JSON report
• OUTPUT.html contains an easy-to-read HTML report

Output example as JSON

Here's an example of dataset of a successful Broken Links Checker run. The error message is included in the report and can be found at the bottom of the example.

[
  {
    "url": "https://blog.apify.com",
    "title": "Apify Blog: Web scraping and automation stories",
    "links": [
      {
        "url": "https://apify.com/",
        "normalizedUrl": "https://apify.com",
        "httpStatus": 200,
        "fragment": "",
        "fragmentValid": true,
        "crawled": true
      },
      {
        "url": "https://apify.com/about",
        "normalizedUrl": "https://apify.com/about",
        "httpStatus": 200,
        "fragment": "",
        "fragmentValid": true,
        "crawled": true
      },
      {
        "url": "https://apify.com/jobs",
        "normalizedUrl": "https://apify.com/jobs",
        "httpStatus": 200,
        "fragment": "",
        "fragmentValid": true,
        "crawled": true
      },
      {
        "url": "https://apify.com/web-scraping",
        "normalizedUrl": "https://apify.com/web-scraping",
        "httpStatus": null,
        "errorMessage": "Error: Navigation timed out after 120 seconds.\n    at handleRequestTimeout (/home/myuser/node_modules/apify/build/crawlers/crawler_utils.js:19:11)\n    at PuppeteerCrawler._handleNavigationTimeout (/home/myuser/node_modules/apify/build/crawlers/browser_crawler.js:418:54)\n    at PuppeteerCrawler._handleNavigation (/home/myuser/node_modules/apify/build/crawlers/browser_crawler.js:401:18)\n    at async PuppeteerCrawler._handleRequestFunction (/home/myuser/node_modules/apify/build/crawlers/browser_crawler.js:343:13)\n    at async wrap (/home/myuser/node_modules/@apify/timeout/index.js:73:27)",
        "fragment": "",
        "fragmentValid": true,
        "crawled": true
      },
...

Other SEO audit tools

You can find other free SEO tools in the Related actors tab: Web Page Analyzer, SEO Audit Tool, Google Search Results Scraper. You should also check out 5 powerful scrapers to add to your SEO tool kit.