v0.0.111

Broken links have nowhere left to hide. Every audit, Quick included, now status-checks the internal link targets its crawl did not fetch, so a linked 404 shows up even when it is not in your sitemap or sits past the page budget. External links stay opt-in at Quick, and there are new flags for both.

Behaviour changes:

• squirrel sends requests it did not send before. After the crawl, every audit sends a status-only HEAD to each internal link target the crawl did not fetch: up to 200 per audit, the links on the most pages first. Before those, it sends one HEAD to the audited URL, to see whether the server answers HEAD properly. These requests send no cookies, credentials or custom request headers, and never go to a link that looks like an action (log out, unsubscribe, delete, add to cart) or carries a token. Switch them off with --no-internal-links or [internal_links] enabled = false.
• Expect new links/broken-links findings, and Links scores that move with them: Quick audits now find linked 404s their sitemap does not list, and Surface and Full audits find broken pages past their page budget.
• "Not checked" is narrower. In 0.0.110 a Quick audit reported every internal link target it did not fetch as Not checked. Now that only covers the targets the status check did not answer: over the limit, outside the crawl scope or robots.txt, an action or token link, no answer, or a site whose HEAD answers cannot be trusted.
• External links: which levels check them by default does not change. Surface and Full do, and Quick does not unless you pass --external-links. An audit that checks them now requests at most its page budget or 200 distinct external links, whichever is more.

Changed

• Internal link checks run at every audit level, Quick included. Each internal link target the crawl did not fetch gets a status-only HEAD request, or a one-byte GET when the server answers HEAD with 405 or 501.
  • The check covers up to 200 targets per audit, the links on the most pages first, inside the crawl scope and, when the crawl respects it, robots.txt. Change the limit with [internal_links] max_targets.
  • It is free: no page is added, rendered or charged.
  • A target that answers with 401 or 403 is recorded as unverifiable in an info-level refused-links check, never as broken. Reports do not list info checks yet.
  • See Link checking defaults.
• The internal link check is built not to change anything on the site.
  • It never requests a link that looks like an action (log out, unsubscribe, delete, confirm, add to cart) or carries a token. It re-checks every redirect hop against the same rules, and it sends no cookies, credentials or custom request headers.
  • On a site that answers HEAD with an error on the audited URL, the targets' errors are not trusted, so they are never reported as broken.
  • These rules are a careful default, not a guarantee. A site that changes state on GET requests to links that read like pages should switch the check off with --no-internal-links.
  • See What the internal link check never requests.
• An audit that checks external links now requests at most its page budget or 200 distinct external links, whichever is more, the links on the most pages first. The rest are listed as Not checked (reason external-links-over-cap). Only sites that link out to more than that see a difference. Change the limit with [external_links] max_links.

Added

• --external-links checks external links for one run at any level, Quick included, and --no-external-links skips them. --no-internal-links switches the internal link check off.
  • --external-links cannot be combined with --offline or --no-external-links, and it overrides [external_links] enabled = false.
  • At Quick it makes the audit custom, custom (quick + external_links on).
  • All three are in the shell completions.
• The local MCP server's audit_website tool takes externalLinks and internalLinks switches. offline: true with externalLinks: true is refused, as on the command line.