linkrescue

Find broken affiliate links on any website. No signup, no API key, works on any stack.

npx linkrescue scan https://yoursite.com

What it does

• Discovers pages via sitemap.xml (falls back to a 2-hop crawl if no sitemap)
• Extracts all outbound links from each page
• Checks each link with per-domain rate limiting
• Flags broken links (4xx/5xx/timeout), redirect chains, and affiliate-specific issues like lost tracking params or redirect-to-homepage

Polite by default:

• Respects robots.txt
• 10-second per-fetch timeout
• Per-domain pacing via internal rate limiter
• User-Agent: LinkRescue-CLI/1.0 (+https://linkrescue.io) — identifies itself, reachable

Install

No install needed for one-offs:

npx linkrescue scan https://yoursite.com

Or install globally:

npm install -g linkrescue
linkrescue scan https://yoursite.com

Commands

# Single-page quick check
linkrescue check https://yoursite.com/some-post

# Multi-page scan (sitemap + crawl, up to 20 pages on free CLI)
linkrescue scan https://yoursite.com

Options

--json                Output JSON instead of pretty terminal (great for scripting)
--affiliate-only      Only show affiliate links in output
--verbose             Show all links, including OK ones
--max-pages <n>       Limit pages (1-20 in free CLI)

Example output

🔍 LinkRescue — Scanning https://example.com

  ✅ 14 OK
  ⚠️  2 Redirects (possible param loss)
  ❌ 3 Broken (4xx)

BROKEN LINKS:
  Page: example.com/posts/best-hiking-gear
    ❌ 404 → https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=123&u=456  (affiliate)
    ❌ 404 → https://amazon.com/dp/B07XYZ  (affiliate)

AFFILIATE ISSUES:
  Page: example.com/posts/travel-tips
    ⚠️  LOST_PARAMS → https://skyscanner.pxf.io/c/214481/1027991/13416
         final: https://skyscanner.com/captcha

  Completed in 3.2s
  5 pages scanned, 24 links checked

GitHub Action

For CI integration, see @linkrescue/github-action.

- uses: carsonlabs/linkrescue-action@v1
  with:
    site: https://yoursite.com
    fail-on: broken

Hosted version

The CLI is free and standalone. For scheduled scans, dashboard, multi-site monitoring, email alerts, revenue estimates, and 200+ pages per scan:

linkrescue.io — free tier, $29/mo Pro, $79/mo Agency.

Why I built this

Existing affiliate link tools (LinkWhisper, Pretty Links) are WordPress plugins. I run Next.js sites. Others (Affilimate) do analytics and attribution, not monitoring. Nothing was dev-friendly: no CLI, no GitHub Action, no API.

Broken affiliate links are silent revenue loss — a click that should have paid $0.50–$2.00 in commission becomes $0. Most sites don't notice until monthly revenue is already down.

This is the tool I wanted. The CLI is MIT-licensed and free forever.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome at github.com/carsonlabs/linkrescue.

Questions? Reach me at [email protected] or file an issue.