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World desk4 min

How to Find and Triage Dead Links With a Checker API

A practical guide to API-based link audits: choose an input scope, collect diagnostics, and distinguish dead destinations from redirects, fragment errors, and temporary failures.
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A broken-link checker API can automate link audits: submit a page, a batch of URLs, or a crawl target; collect status and diagnostic details; then route likely failures for review. The important part is not simply flagging every non-success response as “dead.” Redirects, fragment errors, blocked requests, unreachable hosts, and temporary failures can require different fixes.

What a broken-link checker actually checks

A checker can inspect links in a submitted document, follow links recursively within a site section, or validate a list of URLs supplied to an API. W3C describes its Link Checker as a tool for finding broken links, and its documentation says it reads HTML or XHTML documents and CSS stylesheets, extracts links, checks whether destinations and fragments can be dereferenced, and warns about HTTP redirects. It can also check part of a site recursively. W3C Link Checker documentation

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These results are signals for maintenance, not interchangeable diagnoses. A redirected URL may still reach a valid page, while a fragment can fail even if its page loads. A host that does not respond may be temporarily unavailable, and a request blocked by access controls does not by itself prove the destination is gone. Review the returned status and details before changing or removing a link.

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Choose the input scope that fits the audit

  • One document: Useful when investigating a specific page and its outbound links.
  • A URL list: Useful for checking a known set of links, such as URLs drawn from a content database.
  • A recursive crawl: Useful for discovering links across a site section, but requires limits on scope and request rate.

For a recursive check, define the starting point and allowed scope so the scan does not expand beyond the pages you intend to audit. Check the service’s depth, request limits, and robots handling before scheduling repeated runs. W3C’s documentation says its checker honors robots exclusion rules and that both its command-line and online versions pause at least one second between requests to each server. The online version also limits the number of documents it checks recursively. W3C Link Checker documentation

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How to structure an API-based workflow

An API integration generally needs to submit work, obtain results, interpret diagnostics, and send actionable cases to the right owner. GOV.UK’s Link Checker API documentation illustrates this pattern with an individual check, a batch submission, retrieval of batch results, and a completion webhook. Its page warns that it may be out of date and lists 18 March 2025 as its last-updated date, so treat the routes and fields below as an example rather than a current contract. Confirm the live specification and service status before implementing against it. GOV.UK Link Checker API documentation

  1. Submit the intended work. The documented example uses GET /check for one URI and POST /batch for a set of URIs. Decide whether your integration sends individual URLs or batches based on your input source and the current API’s limits.
  2. Wait for completion. The example provides GET /batch/:id to retrieve a batch and describes a completion webhook. If using polling, follow the service’s documented timing and retry guidance; if using a webhook, verify the callback and associate it with the submitted batch.
  3. Capture diagnostics. The GOV.UK page shows fields including status, checked time, errors, warnings, danger, problem summary, and suggested fix. Verify field names and meanings against a live specification instead of treating these as guaranteed current response fields.
  4. Route cases for review. Store the original URL, observed result, check time, redirect destination where available, and the affected page or content owner. This makes it possible to distinguish a source-page correction from a temporary destination issue.
  5. Recheck after a fix. Run the affected URL or page again before closing the maintenance item, so the workflow confirms that the correction changed the reported result.

Interpret results before changing links

  • Redirect: Inspect the destination. Update the source link when the redirect is unwanted, fragile, or points somewhere materially different; a redirect alone is not the same as an unreachable destination.
  • Unreachable host or failed request: Consider whether the failure may be temporary or caused by request blocking. Recheck and review the diagnostic details before deleting the link.
  • Fragment failure: The page may load while its referenced anchor does not. Check whether the fragment identifier still exists and whether the link should point to a different section.
  • Warning or ambiguous result: Preserve it for review rather than automatically labeling it dead. A checker’s classification depends on what it can observe during that request.
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Distinguish an API from a web checker or local tool

W3C’s Link Checker has online and command-line forms, but the cited documentation does not establish it as a hosted commercial checking API. Separately, the W3C API is a public, read-only JSON API for W3C data; it is not an API for checking broken links. W3C API overview

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LinkChecker is another category: its documentation describes free, GPL-licensed website-validation software requiring Python 3.10 or later. That makes it a self-hosted software option, not evidence of a hosted API service. LinkChecker documentation

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When selecting an approach, compare the actual capabilities you need: accepted input scope, result classifications and diagnostic detail, synchronous versus batch execution, polling or webhook support, crawl controls, and deployment and maintenance responsibility. The cited documentation supports these as evaluation criteria, but does not establish a current commercial API as the best choice or provide a measured accuracy comparison.

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