Dead-Link Watchdog

Automatically scan websites for broken, redirected, or slow links. It's a cloud-based actor that costs $0.0008 per link checked, built on Crawlee and designed for scheduled, automated monitoring.

Overview

Dead-Link Watchdog crawls your site, tests every link it finds, and flags problematic ones based on HTTP status codes. It saves structured results to an Apify Dataset for easy export or integration. Use it for one-off audits or set up recurring scans with Apify's built-in scheduler.

Key Features

• Comprehensive Link Checking: Flags links based on HTTP status codes. By default, it flags all 400+ status errors. You can specify a custom list (e.g., [404, 500, 301, 302]).
• Cost-Effective: Pricing is $0.0008 per link checked (e.g., 1,000 links for $0.80).
• Fully Schedulable: Configure automatic daily, weekly, or monthly runs directly via Apify.
• Structured Output: All results are saved to your Apify Dataset and can be exported as CSV or JSON.
• No Infrastructure Needed: Runs on Apify's platform—no proxies, servers, or local setup required.
• Configurable Crawl: Control crawl depth with maxCrawlDepth and set a hard limit on pages crawled with maxRequestsPerCrawl.

How to Use

Input Parameters

Configure the actor using these main inputs:

For a one-off scan: Run the actor manually with your target domain in startUrls.

For automated monitoring:
1. Go to the actor's Run page on Apify.
2. Click Schedule → New schedule.
3. Set your frequency (daily, weekly, etc.) and input parameters.
4. Save. The scan will now run automatically at your chosen interval.

Input/Output

Input: Provide a starting URL and configure crawl depth, status codes to flag, and request limits as shown above.

Output: The actor saves a record for each flagged link to your Apify Dataset. Each record includes:

{
  "source": "https://example.com/page-with-broken-link",
  "target": "https://example.com/missing-page",
  "status": 404,
  "latency": 120,
  "timestamp": "2025-10-25T13:10:00Z"
}

• source: The page where the bad link was found.
• target: The problematic destination URL.
• status: The HTTP status code returned (e.g., 404, 500, 301).
• latency: Response time in milliseconds.
• timestamp: When the check was performed.

You can view this data in the Apify console or export it as CSV/JSON for further analysis or reporting.