Screaming Frog Ltd · Tools

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

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At a glance

Price
from 245 €/mo
Vendor
Screaming Frog Ltd

Specifications & properties

Key decision factors

Pricing model
Freemium 1

Pricing

Price from
245 €/mo 1
Free tier
Yes 1
Report data / suggest a correction

Metrics vs. the category

Keyword database size
n/a
Backlink index size
n/a

Industry-standard desktop website crawler for technical SEO audits: broken links, meta data, duplicates, JavaScript rendering, structured data validation and XML sitemaps.

Profile

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler from Screaming Frog Ltd built for technical SEO audits — finding broken links, analyzing meta data, spotting duplicate content, rendering JavaScript, validating structured data, and generating XML sitemaps. It's aimed at SEO professionals and technical auditors who want a fast, locally run crawler rather than a cloud-based all-in-one suite, and it's free to use on sites up to 500 URLs.

Who builds it

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is developed by Screaming Frog Ltd, a UK-based company that has built its reputation almost entirely around this one crawler. Rather than expanding into a broad SEO suite, Screaming Frog focuses on being the desktop crawling tool that other SEO software and agencies rely on for deep, controllable, page-by-page site audits.

Core features

  • Broken link, error & redirect detection, so you can find and fix crawl issues before they hurt rankings or user experience.
  • Page title and meta data analysis, covering titles, descriptions, and other on-page elements at scale across a crawl.
  • Meta robots and directive review, to confirm indexation and crawl instructions are set the way you intend.
  • hreflang attribute auditing, useful for sites managing multiple language or regional versions.
  • Exact duplicate page discovery, flagging content that risks cannibalizing itself in search.
  • XML sitemap generation and site visualizations, turning a crawl into deliverables you can hand to a client or dev team.
  • The vendor's own description also highlights JavaScript rendering and structured data validation as part of the crawler's technical-SEO toolkit.

Pricing

  • Free version: free to use indefinitely, limited to crawling up to 500 URLs, and already includes broken-link detection, meta data analysis, hreflang auditing, duplicate discovery, and XML sitemap generation.
  • Paid licence — from €245 per year: removes the 500-URL cap (the practical limit then depends on your machine's allocated memory and storage) and unlocks the software's advanced features.
  • Pricing is published per year, not per month, reflecting Screaming Frog's licence-based, not subscription-tier, model.

Who it's for

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is built for technical SEOs, agencies, and in-house teams that need a controllable, desktop-run crawler for structured, repeatable site audits — the kind of tool you point at a site (your own or a client's) and interrogate directly, rather than a platform with its own keyword or backlink database. Its free version is generous enough for small sites or spot-checks, while the €245/year licence is aimed at anyone auditing larger sites regularly. It pairs naturally with a separate keyword-research or backlink tool, since Screaming Frog's own data, per our data set, doesn't extend to keyword or backlink indexes — it crawls the site you give it, which keeps the licence cost low relative to full SEO suites while leaving database-driven research to dedicated tools.

Frequently asked questions

What does Screaming Frog SEO Spider cost?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is priced as a yearly licence rather than a monthly subscription: the paid version costs €245 per year and removes the free version's 500-URL crawl limit (the practical maximum then depends on your machine's memory and storage). A free version is also available indefinitely for smaller crawls.

Is there a free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Yes. Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a genuinely free version you can use for as long as you want, limited to crawling up to 500 URLs. It already includes broken-link detection, page title and meta data analysis, meta robots and hreflang auditing, duplicate-page discovery, XML sitemap generation, and site visualizations.

What core features does Screaming Frog SEO Spider offer?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a technical-SEO crawler that finds broken links, errors, and redirects; analyzes page titles and meta data; reviews meta robots and directives; audits hreflang attributes; discovers exact duplicate pages; and generates XML sitemaps and site visualizations. Its vendor description also lists JavaScript rendering and structured data validation among its capabilities.

Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb — which should I choose?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler licensed per year, from €245/year, with a capable free version up to 500 URLs, built around deep, page-by-page technical audits. Sitebulb is a similarly positioned desktop/cloud crawler that emphasizes visual reporting and audit hints out of the box. If you want granular, highly configurable control over exactly what and how you crawl, often at a lower cost of entry via the free tier, Screaming Frog is the classic choice; if guided, visual reporting matters more to your workflow, compare it against Sitebulb's current feature set and pricing.

Where does Screaming Frog's data come from, and does it have its own keyword or backlink index?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider doesn't run on a proprietary keyword or backlink database — it's a desktop crawler that fetches and analyzes whatever site you point it at directly, up to your licence's crawl capacity. Our data doesn't document a separate keyword index, backlink index, or fixed crawl-frequency schedule for it, since that's outside what a locally run site crawler does; pair it with a dedicated keyword or backlink tool if you need that kind of index.

Does Screaming Frog SEO Spider have an API?

An API isn't documented in our data for Screaming Frog SEO Spider. If programmatic access matters to you, check the vendor's current documentation directly, since the software is primarily designed as a desktop GUI (and command-line) crawler rather than a cloud API product.