Broken Link Checker — Find 404s, Redirects & Dead Links

Crawl your website and find every broken link: 404s, 5xx errors, dead domains, timeouts, SSL errors, redirect chains, broken images and missing #anchors. One row per broken URL with the pages it is on and the anchor text. $0.50 per 1,000 pages + $0.20 per 1,000 links.

Find every broken link on your website before your visitors (and Google) do. Give it your site's URL and it crawls your pages (following links and the sitemap, respecting robots.txt) and checks every link, image and, optionally, script, stylesheet and iframe on them, including links to other websites. You get one row per broken URL with the pages it appears on (up to 50 listed, with the anchor text) and the total page count, so a dead link in a site-wide footer is one row "found on 480 pages", not 480 rows. Each row has the HTTP status (404, 410, 500…), the error type (HTTP error, dead domain/DNS, timeout, SSL certificate, connection refused, redirect loop, malformed URL), the full redirect chain and final URL. Optional modes add redirects (so you can update links that bounce through 301s) or every link checked, and missing #anchors (links to headings that no longer exist). Links behind bot protection (LinkedIn's 999, Cloudflare challenges, 403/429 from other sites) are reported as blocked, not broken, so your report has no false alarms. Use it for SEO audits, website migrations, documentation QA, content maintenance, agency client reports and scheduled monitoring. $0.50 per 1,000 pages crawled + $0.20 per 1,000 unique links checked: a 100-page site with 300 unique links (the 100 pages included) costs about $0.11, with no compute bill on top.

What data does it return?

Every run outputs clean, schema-validated rows like these:

url	category	status	finalStatus	statusText	errorType	foundOnCount	linkType	isExternal
https://playwright.dev/docs/api/environment-variables/	broken	404	404	Not Found	http	2	a	true
https://crawlee.dev/blog/img/lukasp.webp	broken	404	404	Not Found	http	1	img	false
http://www.youtube/	broken			domain does not resolve (ENOTFOUND)	dns	1	a	true
https://sdk.apify.com/docs/guides/getting-started	redirect	301	200	OK		1	a	true
https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio	blocked	403	403	Forbidden	bot-protection	3	a	true

How much does it cost?

Transparent pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what you get, and the actor always respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and it stops cleanly at the cap instead of overrunning.

Event	Price	Charged	Worked example
page-crawled	$0.0005	per page of your site crawled and scanned for links	100 pages = $0.05; a 1,000-page site = $0.50 (each page URL is also one link-checked event)
link-checked	$0.0002	per unique link checked (each URL once, however many pages link to it)	300 unique links (the 100 crawled pages included) = $0.06, so a 100-page site ≈ $0.11 in total
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	per run per GB of memory (platform start fee)	One run at 1 GB = $0.00005

Input options

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	yes	—	Where to start crawling. The crawl stays on the same site and under each URL's path: https://example.com crawls the whole site, https://example.com/blog only the blog. Every link on the crawled pages is checked, including links to other sites.
maxPages	integer	no	500	Stop crawling after this many pages of your site (links already found are still checked). Each crawled page is one 'page-crawled' event plus one 'link-checked' event (the page URL itself is a checked link).
maxLinks	integer	no	10000	Stop after checking this many unique links (each one is a 'link-checked' event). A safety limit for very link-heavy sites.
maxDepth	integer	no	20	How many clicks away from a start URL to crawl. 0 = scan only the start pages (their links are still checked).
reportMode	string	no	"broken"	Broken: 4xx/5xx, dead domains, timeouts, SSL errors, redirect loops, malformed URLs and missing anchors. Broken + redirects: also links that redirect (with the full chain), so you can update them. All: every link checked, including working ones. Same price whatever you pick.
reportBlocked	boolean	no	true	Some sites refuse automated checks (LinkedIn answers 999, others 403/429 or a Cloudflare challenge). Those links probably work in a browser, so they are reported separately as 'blocked', never as broken. Turn off to hide them.
checkExternalLinks	boolean	no	true	Also check links to other websites (they are only checked, never crawled).
checkImages	boolean	no	true	Check every image (img src) for broken images.
checkResources	boolean	no	false	Also check scripts (script src), stylesheets and icons (link href) and iframes (iframe src).
checkAnchors	boolean	no	false	Report links like /page#section where the crawled page has no element with that id (renamed or removed headings). Free: no extra requests.
includeSubdomains	boolean	no	false	Also crawl subdomains of the start site (e.g. blog.example.com when starting at example.com). Links to subdomains are always checked.
includeGlobs	array	no	[]	Only crawl pages matching one of these, e.g. https://example.com/docs/** (** = anything, * = anything except /). Replaces the default 'stay under the start path' rule. Links to other pages are still checked.
excludeGlobs	array	no	[]	Never crawl pages matching these, e.g. /tag/ or **/page/*. Links to them are still checked.
ignoreLinkGlobs	array	no	[]	Links matching these are neither checked nor reported (and not charged), e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/** or /cdn-cgi/.
useSitemap	boolean	no	true	Also crawl pages listed in the site's sitemap.xml (and sitemaps in robots.txt), so orphan pages and broken sitemap entries are found too.
respectRobotsTxt	boolean	no	true	Don't crawl pages that robots.txt disallows (links to them are still checked with a single request).

Limits & honest notes

• Pages are fetched as static HTML without a browser: fast and cheap, and it covers almost all websites. Links that exist only after JavaScript runs (single-page apps that render their menus client-side) are not found.
• Some sites refuse automated requests: LinkedIn answers 999, others answer 403 or 429 or show a Cloudflare challenge. Those links usually work in a browser, so they are reported as 'blocked' (status kept) instead of broken. Hide them with 'Report bot-blocked links' or skip them with 'Ignore links matching'.
• Each unique link is checked once with a HEAD request; when a server refuses HEAD or answers a common error status (400, 403, 404, 405, 410, 5xx…) or drops the connection, the result is confirmed with GET before it is called broken. Redirects are followed up to 10 hops, with the full chain recorded. Each request times out after 20 seconds.
• Polite by design: at most 2 requests at a time per host, and a 429 'Too Many Requests' pauses that host for its Retry-After. Very link-heavy external hosts (GitHub, for example) therefore take a while to check.
• Crawling respects robots.txt and stays on your site and under the start URL's path, unless you set include globs. Links to pages robots.txt disallows are still checked with a single request, since checking a link is not crawling. If a site's robots.txt can't be fetched (HTTP 5xx or a network error, after one retry), none of that site's pages are crawled (RFC 9309) and its start URL is reported as skipped, not charged. Login-protected pages are not supported.
• Missing-anchor checks compare #fragments with the ids in the static HTML of crawled pages; anchors added by JavaScript are reported as missing. Results are delivered when the crawl finishes; runs resume after a platform migration without re-charging work already done.
• Links to internal network addresses (localhost, private IPs, cloud metadata) are never requested and never charged.
• Respects your run budget: set a maximum total charge and the run stops cleanly at the cap and reports everything checked so far.

Related ActorForge actors

• SEO Audit Crawler — full on-page SEO checks for every page
• Sitemap URL Extractor
• Website Change Monitor
• Website to Markdown

Changelog

• 2026-10-18 — Initial release: same-site crawling with sitemaps, robots.txt and globs; checks links, images and optionally scripts, stylesheets, icons and iframes; HEAD with GET fallback; redirect chains; DNS/timeout/SSL/connection classification; bot-blocked detection; missing-anchor checks; grouped rows with every page a link appears on; migration-safe resume.

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Built and maintained by ActorForge. Reliability first: every actor in the portfolio is monitored by an automated nightly self-test, and breakages are typically fixed the same day.