Find Broken Links & Redirect Chains from Sitemaps (Slack)

Find broken links and redirect chains from your sitemaps—automatically in Slack

This n8n workflow crawls your sitemap, checks every extracted link’s HTTP status without following redirects, and sends a weekly Slack report that highlights new broken links and redirect chains. It also keeps a history in an n8n Data Table so you only get changes.

What this workflow does

• Runs weekly (or on demand): Scheduled for Monday, or started manually, then reads the sitemap URL and crawl limits from workflow settings.
• Crawls your sitemap: Fetches the sitemap XML and parses it as either a sitemap index (child sitemaps) or a flat sitemap (page URLs).
• Collects and deduplicates links: Selects and caps page URLs to crawl, fetches HTML in batches, extracts all anchor links, resolves relative URLs, filters unwanted link types, and deduplicates to a capped list of distinct internal and (optionally) external URLs.
• Checks HTTP responses (redirects disabled): Requests each distinct URL once via HTTP GET with redirects disabled, then classifies outcomes as ok, blocked, broken, or redirected-to-a-different-target.
• Reports only new problems: Compares broken/redirected findings against previously reported items stored in an n8n Data Table and keeps only newly changed issues.
• Posts to Slack: Sends a formatted summary with counts and new findings to your chosen Slack channel, then upserts newly reported problems back into the Data Table.

Use cases

• Detect link rot after migrations (updated URLs, removed content, refactored routes).
• Surface SEO-impacting issues like broken internal links and unexpected redirects.
• Continuously monitor large sites by crawling sitemap-defined pages on a schedule.

Technical details

• Integrations: Slack (credential + target channel)
• Data storage: n8n Data Table named link_rot with columns including link_key, url, status, verdict, and timestamps (e.g., found_on / last_se…).
• Workflow nodes: if, set, code, no op, merge, slack.