Does outgoing link checking slow down the crawl?

Slightly. Checking every outgoing link adds one extra request per external link. For most sites the overhead is under 10 percent. You can disable it by passing check_outgoing_links: false if you only care about internal pages.

Will the agent fix the broken links automatically?

No. The agent identifies broken links and tells you which page links to them. You or your developer still need to update the HTML, set up redirects, or remove dead links.

Can I find broken links on a single page without crawling the whole site?

Yes. Use fetch_page on the specific URL. The response includes outgoing_link_errors for that page only, which is faster than a full site crawl.

How to Find Broken Links with Claude and MCP

Broken links hurt SEO and user experience. Instead of running a CLI command and reading raw output, you can ask Claude to find broken links for you. The agent crawls the site, checks outgoing links, and presents the results in plain language.

This guide shows the agent-driven equivalent of the CLI broken link audit.

Step 1: Install crawler-mcp

Run the install script:

curl -fsSL https://install.crawler.sh/install-mcp.sh | sh

This downloads the correct binary for your platform to ~/.crawler/bin/crawler-mcp.

For more detail, see the installation guide.

Step 2: Wire it into your client

Step 3: Crawl with outgoing link checking

Ask the agent to crawl and check outgoing links:

Use crawler-sh to crawl https://example.com to depth 3. Check outgoing links and report any that return 4xx or 5xx.

The crawl_site tool checks outgoing links by default. Each page result includes an outgoing_link_errors array with broken URLs, status codes, and the linking page.

Step 4: Review broken links

Ask Claude to summarise the findings:

List every broken link, the page it was found on, and the HTTP status code.

Claude extracts the outgoing_link_errors from each page and presents a clean table.

Step 5: Export for your team

Ask Claude to format the report:

Create a CSV with columns: broken_url, status_code, found_on_page, link_type.

Claude writes a structured report you can share with developers or content editors.