As someone who works with content creators, I was frustrated by the problem of "link rot." Creators who monetize with affiliate links are constantly losing revenue because links in their old content (blog posts, YouTube descriptions) silently break, leading to 404s or out-of-stock product pages.
I looked for a tool to fix this, but the existing solutions were either locked into a single ecosystem (like Amazon-only scanners) or were overly complex, expensive enterprise platforms. There was no simple, free tool for the average "prosumer" creator who uses multiple affiliate merchants.
So, I built this MVP. LinkPatrol is a 100% free, merchant-agnostic web app.
Technically, it's a simple scanner. You give it your youtube channel (website coming soon), and it crawls your videos' descriptions to identify broken hyperlinks (404s) and, just as importantly, links to product pages that are "Out of Stock." The goal is to give creators a simple report so they can go fix the links that are costing them money.
It's still very much an MVP, and I'm posting it here to get honest technical feedback on the scanning process, its utility, and any bugs you find. The app is at www.linkpatrol.in. I'll be here all day to answer questions.
Hi HN, I'm the builder of LinkPatrol.
As someone who works with content creators, I was frustrated by the problem of "link rot." Creators who monetize with affiliate links are constantly losing revenue because links in their old content (blog posts, YouTube descriptions) silently break, leading to 404s or out-of-stock product pages.
I looked for a tool to fix this, but the existing solutions were either locked into a single ecosystem (like Amazon-only scanners) or were overly complex, expensive enterprise platforms. There was no simple, free tool for the average "prosumer" creator who uses multiple affiliate merchants.
So, I built this MVP. LinkPatrol is a 100% free, merchant-agnostic web app.
Technically, it's a simple scanner. You give it your youtube channel (website coming soon), and it crawls your videos' descriptions to identify broken hyperlinks (404s) and, just as importantly, links to product pages that are "Out of Stock." The goal is to give creators a simple report so they can go fix the links that are costing them money.
It's still very much an MVP, and I'm posting it here to get honest technical feedback on the scanning process, its utility, and any bugs you find. The app is at www.linkpatrol.in. I'll be here all day to answer questions.