The industry leading website crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux, trusted by thousands of SEOs and agencies worldwide for technical SEO site audits.
Windows
macOS
Linux
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO by auditing for common SEO issues.
Download & crawl 500 URLs for free. No sign-up required, no time limit. Identifies 300+ SEO issues across technical, on-page, performance and content dimensions.
Every version is free to download. Crawl and audit up to 500 URLs with no sign-up, no registration and no time limit.
+ v23.1 (Nov 2025), v23.2 (Dec 2025), v23.3 (Feb 2026)
Identify over 300 SEO issues, warnings and opportunities to improve SEO, website health and user experience.
Crawl a website and find broken links (404s) and server errors. Export source URLs for developer handoff.
Find temporary and permanent redirects, identify redirect chains and loops, or upload a URL list for migration auditing.
Identify titles and descriptions that are too long, short, missing or duplicated across your site.
Find exact duplicate URLs via MD5 hash, partial duplicates in titles and headings, and low content pages.
Collect any data from page HTML using CSS Path, XPath or regex — prices, SKUs, social meta tags and more.
View URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots or X-Robots-Tag noindex/nofollow, plus canonicals and hreflang.
Quickly create XML and Image XML Sitemaps with full control over URLs, last modified, priority and change frequency.
Connect Google Analytics 4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights APIs to enrich all crawled URLs.
Render pages using the built-in Chromium WRS to crawl dynamic sites — Angular, React and Vue.js supported.
Evaluate internal linking with interactive force-directed diagrams, tree graphs and 3D site visualisations.
Schedule crawls at chosen intervals and auto export to any location including Google Sheets, or run via command line.
Track SEO issue progress between crawls and compare staging against production with advanced URL Mapping.
★★★★★"Out of the myriad of tools we use at iPullRank I can definitively say that I only use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider every single day. It's incredibly feature-rich, rapidly improving and I regularly find a new use case."
★★★★★"The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is my 'go to' tool for initial SEO audits and quick validations: powerful, flexible and low-cost. I couldn't recommend it more."
★★★★★"I've tested nearly every SEO tool on the market, but I can't think of any I use more often than Screaming Frog. To me, it's the Swiss Army Knife of SEO Tools."
★★★★★"The Screaming Frog SEO Crawler is one of the essential tools I turn to when performing a site audit. It saves time when I want to analyze the structure of a site."
Screaming Frog SEO Spider runs on every working agency SEO's laptop because no cloud tool matches it on the audits clients actually pay for. The desktop crawler downloads a site the way a search engine does — every URL, every status code, every canonical and hreflang and meta tag — then exports a deliverable a junior SEO can hand to a developer the same afternoon. The tool charges nothing for the first 500 URLs and lifts every limit at a flat annual licence for the unlimited build.
This page is the agency-facing guide to the screaming frog seo spider in 2026 — what is screaming frog used for in practice, the version 24 features that changed daily audit workflows, how to use screaming frog to improve on page seo in a five-pass sequence, and where the seo screaming frog tool sits against Ahrefs Site Audit, SEMrush, SE Ranking and DeepCrawl when the URL count starts climbing past six figures.
Quick answer: Screaming Frog free crawls 500 URLs without sign-up. The paid Pro licence lifts the limit and unlocks JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, API integrations and scheduling — one licence per consultant, two machines.
In one sentence: Screaming Frog is a desktop spider that crawls any website locally, renders JavaScript with a built-in Chromium engine, and exports a complete URL inventory tagged with every SEO problem the auditor needs to fix. Local-on-disk crawls mean no cloud quota, no per-row pricing and no audit data sitting on a vendor's servers. That single property is why most agencies adopt screaming frog inside the first month and keep it for years.
The screaming frog seo tool flags 300+ distinct issue types — duplicate titles, thin descriptions, redirect chains, soft 404s, mismatched canonicals, broken hreflang clusters, render-blocking resources, slow Core Web Vitals, oversized DOM, missing structured data — and exports each list as a CSV the developer can ticket. One desktop binary replaces a sitemap generator, a broken-link checker, a redirect mapper, a schema validator and a log-file analyser. For seo screaming frog audits at any client size, that consolidation is the value.
The v24 release brought the biggest workflow update since JavaScript rendering. Three additions changed how agencies run repeat audits.
Connect the spider to Claude, LM Studio or Cursor via Model Context Protocol. Junior analysts run crawls, slice exports and surface insights through plain-English prompts — auditing throughput up, training time down.
Set a weekly scheduled crawl with Auto-Compare enabled. The next morning's inbox shows a diff against last week — every new issue and every fix that landed since. Client status updates become a copy-paste job.
A dedicated report flags JavaScript-injected URLs the engine cannot reach, plus syntactically invalid URLs like hppts://example.com. Catches the technical bugs every manual review misses.
Beyond v24: the screaming frog seo spider features set also includes JavaScript rendering via the built-in Chromium WRS (React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, Astro, Remix), custom extraction with XPath, CSS selector or regex pulling any DOM element into a column, and full GA4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights API overlay so traffic, click-through and Core Web Vitals data sit next to every crawled URL.
A built-in structured-data validator covers schema.org and Google rich-result checks. The separate log-file analyser companion app handles crawl-budget audits when you need to see exactly how Googlebot moves through a 500k-URL site.
Screaming frog pricing has stayed flat since 2017 — the only SEO crawler with no inflation-tied subscription. Two tiers, both genuinely usable, both transparent.
Feature parity between Mac and Windows is exact in 2026. The Linux build adds Arm64 support as of v24. Pick your OS by personal preference, not capability — the crawls produce identical outputs.
Screaming Frog ships as a notarised universal binary across macOS Monterey (12) through Sequoia (15) and macOS Tahoe (26). Apple Silicon delivers roughly 2x the crawl throughput of comparably-clocked Intel Macs on JavaScript-rendered sites — an M3 Pro processes 100k React URLs in about half the time of an Intel i9.
Default RAM allocation is 2 GB. Raise it via Configuration → System → Memory; M-series machines comfortably handle 32 GB allocations for million-URL crawls. The binary installs to /Applications/Screaming Frog SEO Spider.app and stores its crawl database under ~/Library/Application Support/Screaming Frog SEO Spider/.
Windows builds support Windows 10 and Windows 11 (64-bit only). Workstation-grade machines easily push the memory ceiling past 32 GB for genuinely enterprise-scale crawls — useful when an e-commerce client has 800k SKUs and asks for a full nightly audit.
The installer lands in C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ with the crawl database under %APPDATA%\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\. Feature parity with the Mac build is exact: every report, every API integration and every export format works identically.
The four most-searched comparisons — screaming frog vs ahrefs, ahrefs vs screaming frog, screaming frog vs semrush and screaming frog vs deepcrawl — all map to the same trade-off: desktop spider with local data vs cloud platform with research add-ons.
How to use screaming frog to improve on page seo on a new client — the five-pass workflow most agencies settle into. Fits inside one afternoon for a mid-sized site, ships a developer ticket list by close of business.
Toggle Configuration → Spider → Rendering → JavaScript. Set crawl limits, exclude staging subdomains, add the client's authenticated cookie if you need to crawl gated areas.
Crawl the production domain end-to-end. Open Reports → Crawl Overview and triage the top three issue buckets — typically missing meta descriptions, duplicate titles, broken internal links. Export each as CSV.
Configuration → API Access — link Google Search Console, GA4 and PageSpeed Insights. Crawl URLs gain impression, CTR and Core Web Vitals columns. Prioritise rewrites where the traffic already exists.
Sitemaps → XML Sitemap from the clean crawl, excluding redirected and 404 URLs. Submit through Search Console — the property's coverage report becomes the next audit's baseline.
Set a weekly scheduled crawl with Auto-Compare on. New issues surface in the inbox the day they appear — works identically on Mac and Windows. The client's status email writes itself.
This is the workflow that turns a one-off crawl into a measurable rankings move. Grab the build from the Download button below — every report described above is in the free tier.
The industry's most trusted website crawler. No sign-up required. Available for Windows, macOS and Linux.