Link Rot Sentinel
Checks every link on your site and tells you which ones died this month.
What you're making
Links on old posts quietly break and you never find out. This crawls your own site on a schedule, follows every outbound link, and reports the dead ones with the page they're on so you can fix them. It also spots links that now redirect somewhere unrelated, which is worse than a plain 404 because it looks fine.
A scheduled crawler that validates outbound links across a site and reports failures grouped by source page. The subtlety is distinguishing a genuinely dead link from a site that merely blocks robots.
Hosting · Free forever
Deploys free on GitHub Actions, Cloudflare Workers Cron or your own machine.
GitHub Actions runs scheduled jobs free on public repositories, so this can tick along without a server.
Runs on a schedule for free, or on your own machine.
Core features · 7
- Crawls your own site to collect every outbound link
- Checks each destination and records the result
- Groups failures by the page that contains them
- Flags redirects that land somewhere unrelated
- Runs on a schedule and only reports on change
- Rate limits itself so it never hammers a destination
- Distinguishes a dead link from one that just blocks bots
The interesting part
- Many sites block automated requests, so a naive checker reports false deaths
- Checking hundreds of links politely and in parallel
- Deciding when a redirect is fine and when it means the content is gone
Once it works
- Suggest an archived copy for dead links
- Open an issue automatically for each break
- Track a link-health score over time