LinkTests

LinkTests is a software tool and testing framework designed to validate hyperlinks within digital content. It aims to identify broken or misdirected links, verify redirects, and assess overall link quality across websites, documentation, and APIs.

The tool crawls target content, extracts links, resolves relative URLs, and follows a configurable sequence of requests to determine the final destination. It reports on HTTP status codes, redirect chains, SSL issues, mixed content, and the validity of anchor text and metadata. LinkTests can distinguish internal and external links, classify links by protocol, and flag potentially misleading or deprecated URLs.

Key features include automated crawling, link validation, customizable checks, and rich reporting. Outputs may include JSON or HTML reports, dashboards, and delta comparisons between runs. It supports scheduling, integration with continuous integration pipelines, and extensible plugins for additional content types such as Markdown, PDFs, or API responses.

The architecture typically comprises a crawler, a validator, a resolver, and a reporter, with pluggable backends for storage and analysis. It respects robots.txt and rate limits, and can operate in parallel to scale across large sites.

Common use cases are website health monitoring, validation during content migration, and SEO or accessibility audits. The project aims to reduce broken links, improve user experience, and provide actionable remediation data for web teams.

History and status: LinkTests emerged as an open-source solution for link integrity testing and has been adopted by teams across various industries. See also: link checker, web crawler, QA automation.