Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Team Pick
SEO & AEO
Hand a developer a spreadsheet of every broken link and truncated title on the site.
ACCESS
Desktop download
PRICE
Free to 500 URLs
HOST
Screaming Frog
CATEGORY
Site crawl & audit
Last updated
August 4, 2026

Preview

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

What it is.

Point the SEO Spider at a domain and it walks the site page by page, so you end up with one filterable table of status codes, titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, hreflang, plus internal links.

Crawl up to 500 URLs and you pay nothing, which covers a marketing site and most documentation trees. A license at 245 euros a year lifts the cap and adds scheduling, JavaScript rendering, plus crawl comparison.

What you get.

  • A CSV a developer works straight from, with the source page named for every bad link.
  • Every title over 60 characters flagged, which is the list that wins back clicks fastest.
  • The pages nothing links to internally, which is usually why they never rank.
  • An XML sitemap built from the pages the crawler reached, which often differs from the CMS list.
HOW TO USE IT

How to set it up.

1

Download the app, open Configuration and set the user agent to Googlebot for a first pass.

2

Enter the domain and crawl, then read Response Codes first to clear broken pages and redirect chains.

3

Switch to Page Titles and filter for Over 60 Characters to find titles at risk of truncation.

4

Open Internal and sort by Inlinks to find pages with nothing pointing at them.

5

Export the Crawl Overview report, then keep it as the baseline you compare next month's crawl against.

6

Stay under 500 URLs per crawl on the free version by crawling one subfolder at a time.

Pricing Plans

Free version

$0

crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl

Paid license

245 EUR

per year, per user, no crawl cap

Use cases

Developer handoff

Crawl, export the broken links with their source pages, and send the CSV to whoever owns the template.

Truncated titles

Sort titles by length and rewrite anything the results will cut off.

Orphan page sweep

Crawl with the sitemap included and list the pages nothing internally links to.

Best for

Auditing a marketing site

Under 500 URLs a free crawl covers the whole thing, and the export is the audit document.

Finding broken internal links

The redirect and broken link reports name the source page for every bad link, so a developer goes straight to it.

Checking a template change

Crawl one subfolder before and after a release and compare titles and canonicals row by row.

Open the tool

Opens on Google in a new tab.

Open the Tool

Questions about Screaming Frog SEO Spider

What does the free version limit?
Does it work on a JavaScript site?
Is there a hosted version?

Questions about SEO & AEO

How long should a title tag be?
Should you crawl as Googlebot or as a browser?
Before you start
  • A desktop machine to install it on, since it is a downloaded application.
  • Permission to crawl the domain repeatedly without tripping a rate limit.
Strengths
  • The crawl runs locally, so nothing is sampled and the export has no row cap.
  • The free version keeps the full feature list and only limits the crawl to 500 URLs.
  • One paid tier at 245 euros per year, with volume discounts, so the upgrade decision is simple.
Limitations
  • 500 URLs per crawl on the free version, so a large site has to be crawled a subfolder at a time.
  • Scheduling, JavaScript rendering, plus crawl comparison sit behind the paid license.
  • It uses your machine's memory, so a big crawl on a laptop needs the storage mode switched to database.
Skip this if
  • Your site runs past the free crawl cap and you already have a hosted crawler on contract.
Ideal for
  • SEO leads
  • Technical marketers
  • Agency auditors

Got the free stack.
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