Dead Link Crawler
Crawls a live site using a Python stdlib crawler and reports internal links returning 4xx/5xx status codes.
Entry verified April 21, 2026
The short answer
Point it at one site name, or run against all Netlify-hosted sites with no argument. It walks up to 40 internal pages per site, follows same-domain anchors, and groups broken links by site so you can triage 404s fast.
When to use it
Run after a URL-structure change or a site restructure (e.g. Vendors.ie or BAWT) when internal links are most likely to snap. Also useful as a pre-audit sweep before a full QA pass, or when outbound references have had time to rot and need a spot-check.
Setup
- 1
Save the file as ~/.claude/commands/dead-links.md.
- 2
Invoke with an optional site name or number from the /sites list: /dead-links <site>.
- 3
With no argument, the crawler runs against all sites in the built-in list (vendors.ie, tenderwatch.ie, fluentatdesk.com, the flash reports, readingcurator.com, glitchtexteffect.com, mytriathloncalculator.com).
- 4
Uses urllib only — no external dependencies, no wget required.
- 5
For deeper crawls, run against a single site since the 40-page cap keeps batch runs reasonable.
Example
You: /dead-links promptwritingstudio.com Claude: Crawled 184 pages, 1,247 links. 3 broken. All 3 are outbound (rotted referenced articles). Fix list attached.
Source & attribution
- Author
- Bryan Collins
- Licence
- MIT (author's own work)
- Type
- Original
Original pattern published under MIT — attribution preserved by convention, not licence requirement.
Caveats
Respect robots.txt on outbound crawls. Heavy on big sites — rate-limit.
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