A broken link checker scans a website's pages and identifies URLs that return error status codes (404 Not Found, 410 Gone, 5xx Server Error) or that redirect to unexpected destinations. Broken links damage SEO, frustrate users, and indicate poor site maintenance.
Web scraping APIs like AlterLab can be used to build custom broken link detection pipelines — crawl a site to collect all internal and external links, then request each link and check the HTTP status code. This approach gives you full programmatic control over the detection logic and output format.
Unlike browser-based checkers, API-driven link checking works headlessly, scales to large sites, and integrates directly into CI/CD pipelines or content management workflows.