Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls a website page by page, the way a search engine bot would, then lists what gets in the way: broken links, redirects, missing tags, duplicate content. We use it in every website audit and before any migration.

What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is desktop software built by the UK agency Screaming Frog. It crawls a website and flags more than 300 SEO issues, warnings and opportunities (official website).

• Technical errors: 404s, redirect chains, orphan pages.
• Tags: missing, overlong or duplicate titles, meta descriptions and H1s.
• Indexing: robots directives, canonicals, hreflang and XML sitemaps.
• JavaScript rendering: raw page compared with the rendered page.
• Custom extraction: pull any element from the code, such as a JSON-LD schema.

Screaming Frog pricing: free or licence?

The free version is enough for a small website. A licence becomes useful once the site goes past 500 URLs or when you need to save and compare crawls. The details below come from the official pricing page, checked on October 23, 2026.

How to audit a website with Screaming Frog

1. Run a first crawl in Spider mode on the homepage URL.
2. Sort the errors by tab: response codes, titles, H1s, images.
3. Cross-check with Google data by connecting Search Console to find crawled pages with no clicks.
4. Export an action plan ranked by impact, then recrawl after fixes.

Before a redesign, the crawl of the old site also serves as the base for the 301 redirect plan.

Check what AI crawlers can read

AI assistant crawlers do not always execute JavaScript. A crawl with JavaScript disabled shows the text actually available to them. We explain this method in our guide to SEO optimization for LLMs. If the main content disappears without JavaScript, it also disappears for part of the AI engines.

The tool also lets you change the crawl user agent, to test how the server responds to a specific bot.

Screaming Frog, Ahrefs or Semrush?

Screaming Frog analyzes the site structure from your computer. Ahrefs and Semrush add market data: keywords, rankings and backlinks. Both suites offer a cloud site audit that is easier to schedule but less detailed to configure. For an in-depth technical audit, Screaming Frog remains the reference we use.

Our review of Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog offers the best ratio between price and depth of analysis for a technical audit. Its yearly licence costs less than one month of most SEO suites. The interface is dense and takes time to learn.

Strengths

• A free version that is useful up to 500 URLs.
• Very fine control over the crawl.
• An affordable yearly licence.

Watch-outs

• A technical interface with little guidance.
• Crawls limited by computer memory.
• No keyword or backlink data without integrations.

Our SEO and GEO agency includes this crawl in every audit, so fixes are prioritized by impact.

FAQ: common questions about Screaming Frog

Is Screaming Frog free?

Yes, up to 500 URLs per crawl. Beyond that, a licence costs £199 per year.

Does Screaming Frog work on Mac?

Yes. The software is available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Can you crawl a Webflow website with Screaming Frog?

Yes. Webflow serves complete HTML pages, which the software reads without JavaScript rendering. The crawl lets you check the redirects, tags and sitemap generated by Webflow.

What is a free alternative to Screaming Frog?

Google Search Console reports indexing errors without you crawling the site. The site audits in Ahrefs and Semrush also come in limited versions.