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GitHub Action · v1 · MIT

Put an SEO check in your CI pipeline

crawlcove-action wraps the Crawl Cove CLI as a GitHub Action. Point it at the preview or staging URL of a pull request and it crawls up to 100 pages, fails the check on the first broken internal link, missing title, noindex page or two-hop redirect chain, and posts one comment on the PR that it keeps updating. It ships with example workflows for hosted previews, a Next.js build crawled inside the job, and a scheduled WordPress staging crawl.

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Free · MIT-licensed · README checked September 2026

Add it to a workflow 

- uses: CrawlCove/crawlcove-action@v1
  with:
    url: https://preview-123.example.com/

Inputs 

# inputs (all optional except url)
max-pages: 100
fail-on: broken-links,missing-titles,noindex,redirect-chains   # or none
threshold: 1
ignore-robots: 'false'
concurrency: 4
timeout: 15000
comment: 'true'          # pull_request events only
cli-version: v1.1.2

The README in the repo is the authoritative reference; the commands above are copied from it as of September 2026. If they disagree, the README is newer.

What it checks

  • Broken internal links: every link to a 4xx, 5xx or unreachable page, plus each such page itself.
  • Pages with no title tag.
  • Pages carrying a robots noindex meta tag.
  • URLs that went through two or more redirects.
  • A PR comment with a per-check table and expandable detail, updated on every run rather than duplicated.
  • Outputs for later steps: exit-code, pages, broken-links, missing-titles, noindex, redirect-chains and report-path.

Limits worth knowing

  • The PR comment needs permissions: pull-requests: write on the job; everything else works with the default token.
  • A preview host that blocks all crawlers in robots.txt yields exit code 2 and a "could not run" summary, not a false pass. Set ignore-robots for hosts you own.
  • Previews are often deliberately noindex; drop noindex from fail-on there rather than turning the check off everywhere.

Works with Crawl Cove

Crawl Cove GitHub Action covers the checks it lists above. The desktop app runs the full site audit: every page, every finding ranked by impact, history over time and Search Console data alongside. See the desktop checker or compare the plans.

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Related How to use it: the walkthrough crawlcove-cli crawlcove-export-spec crawlcove-mcp All open-source repos

Frequently asked questions

What does the action need from my repo?
A URL it can reach. For hosted previews the URL arrives in a deployment_status event from your host's GitHub integration, so no secrets are needed. For a site built inside the job, serve the build on localhost first and pass that URL with ignore-robots set, because a local build's robots.txt usually blocks everything.
Will it fail my build on a noindex preview?
By default, yes, because noindex is one of the four gated checks. Preview deployments are often noindex on purpose, so the hosted-preview example limits fail-on to broken-links, missing-titles and redirect-chains. Choose the checks that are regressions for your site.
Where does the full report go?
The action writes a JSON report, one object per page, and exposes its path as the report-path output. Upload it with actions/upload-artifact to keep it. Its page fields follow the export spec, so anything that reads a Crawl Cove export can read it.
Is this on the GitHub Marketplace?
Not yet. The action works from its repo with uses: CrawlCove/crawlcove-action@v1 today; a Marketplace listing is a separate submission that has not been made.

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