Is there a way to identify broken URLs in Knowledge Articles?

[Kim27]

We are managing several thousand knowledge articles. Is there an automated way to validate URLs added to KBAs are working properly? These may be URLs to external sites or URLs to other knowledge articles. 

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

Unfortunately, there is not a way without some sort of complex logic. Not sure how the system would be able to know if an external URL is now broken.

The only thing you could possibly try to do is to ensure it's formatted properly, but it should remain that way by design if it was inserted properly initially.

Can you give a bit more information?

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[David Kay]

Dumb question: could you use a tool something like this?  (A random example found on the web--I don't know anything about this tool in particular)
https://www.drlinkcheck.com/

[Lesley W]

Unfortunately, there is nothing in ServiceNow for this.

I personally use a periodic report and macro in a spreadsheet to pull out the URLs from the HTML, remove duplicates, create hyperlinks and then I and/or a team member click through them all in sets of 20.

If you come up with something please do share as this is a topic that's of interest to everyone and is highly discussed.

There is an idea that could use more votes to show its importance.

Knowledge articles need automation to find bad urls/bad email addresses: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=7a2ec28fdb079c106621d9d96896194f&sysparm_idea_table=x_snc_com_ideation_idea&sysparm_module_id=enhancement_requests

[jaimehonaker]

@Lesley for the win! you beat me to it! 🙂