Screaming Frog
SEO Spider

The enterprise-grade desktop SEO crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux — the spider in-house SEO teams at SaaS platforms, marketplaces and large e-commerce brands run nightly against millions of URLs.

Windows Windows macOS macOS Linux Linux
Screaming Frog SEO Spider screenshot

SEO Spider Tool

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop SEO crawler that lets enterprise teams keep technical hygiene under control across large, fast-changing properties — without shipping crawl data to a vendor cloud.

Evaluate it free on 500 URLs with no sign-up and no expiry, then unlock unlimited crawls under a shared team licence. Flags 300+ SEO issues across technical, on-page, performance and content layers.

500
free evaluation URLs
300+
audit checks reported
10+
years shipping releases
v24.0
current build

Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Versions 19 to 24

Pick any release below to deploy across your team — each is free to evaluate on 500 URLs, with no sign-up and no clock running out.

v23.0

Insight Audits & Semantic Rules

  • Lighthouse & PSI updated to Insight Audits
  • Ahrefs v3 API integration
  • Crawl retention auto-delete settings
  • Semantic similarity embedding rules
  • All links displayed in visualizations
  • Links in Semantic Content Cluster Diagram

+ v23.1 (Nov 2025), v23.2 (Dec 2025), v23.3 (Feb 2026)

v22.0

Semantic Analysis & AI Improvements

  • Semantic Similarity Analysis
  • Semantic Content Cluster Visualisation
  • Advanced column configurator
  • Custom multi-export functionality
  • Export to multiple tabs in one workbook
  • Download multiple XML sitemaps
  • Download from Google Sheets · APIs mode
v21.0

Direct AI API Integration

  • AI integration: OpenAI, Google Gemini & Ollama
  • Generate & classify content with AI in-app
  • Accessibility auditing tab
  • Email notifications for completed crawls
  • Custom search bulk upload
v20.0

Custom JS Snippets & Mobile Audits

  • Custom JavaScript Snippets execution
  • Mobile Usability Auditing
  • N-grams content analysis
  • Aggregated Anchor Text reporting
  • Local Lighthouse integration
  • Carbon Footprint & Rating assessment
v19.0

UI Refresh & 3D Visualizations

  • Redesigned UI and updated interface
  • Unified configuration settings panel
  • Segments functionality for filtered analysis
  • Visual Custom Extraction
  • 3D site visualizations
  • New filters and issue categories

Release Timeline — v19 to v24

v24.0 MCP Integration · Auto Compare · Arm64 Linux
v23.3 Bug fixes & stability
v23.2 Bug fixes
v23.1 Bug fixes & stability
v23.0 Insight Audits · Ahrefs v3 · Semantic Rules
v22.0 Semantic Analysis · Content Clusters · APIs Mode
v21.0 AI API Integration · Accessibility · Email Notifications
v20.0 Custom JS Snippets · Mobile Usability · Carbon Footprint
v19.0 UI Refresh · Segments · 3D Visualizations

What can your team do with the SEO Spider?

Surface 300+ SEO issues, warnings and opportunities across every property in your portfolio — and feed the results straight into your reporting stack.

Find Broken Links

Find Broken Links

Sweep a domain for 404s and 5xx errors, then bulk-export source URLs into the engineering queue.

Audit Redirects

Audit Redirects

Map 301s and 302s, untangle chains and loops, and upload legacy URL lists to validate every hop before a migration goes live.

Analyse Metadata

Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data

Catch titles and descriptions that run long, fall short, go missing or repeat across thousands of templated URLs.

Duplicate Content

Discover Duplicate Content

Detect exact duplicates by MD5 hash, near-duplicate titles and headings, and the thin pages faceted navigation spawns.

Custom Extraction

Extract Data with XPath

Scrape any element with CSS Path, XPath or regex — price tiers, SKUs, inventory and structured data — into named columns for BI.

Robots Directives

Review Robots & Directives

Audit URLs gated by robots.txt, meta robots or X-Robots-Tag, then verify canonicals and hreflang across multi-region storefronts.

XML Sitemaps

Generate XML Sitemaps

Build XML and Image XML Sitemaps from a clean crawl, with full control over which URLs ship plus last-modified, priority and change-frequency.

Google API Integration

Integrate with GA, GSC & PSI

Wire in GA4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights APIs so traffic, impressions and Core Web Vitals land beside every URL.

JavaScript Crawling

Crawl JavaScript Websites

Execute pages through the embedded Chromium rendering service to crawl component-driven storefronts on React, Angular, Vue or Next.js.

Site Architecture

Visualise Site Architecture

Inspect internal linking and crawl depth on sprawling catalogues via force-directed diagrams, tree graphs and 3D site maps.

Schedule Audits

Schedule Audits

Queue unattended nightly or weekly crawls with auto-export to Google Sheets, or trigger them from the command line.

Compare Crawls

Compare Crawls & Staging

Track how issue counts trend release over release and diff staging against production with advanced URL Mapping.

300+ checks across every layer of an enterprise site

Technical

  • Broken links & 404 errors
  • Redirect chains & loops
  • Blocked resources (robots.txt)
  • HTTPS / mixed content
  • Hreflang & internationalisation
  • Pagination (rel=next/prev)

On-Page SEO

  • Page titles & meta descriptions
  • H1, H2 and heading structure
  • Canonical tags & noindex
  • Duplicate & near-duplicate content
  • Thin / low-content pages
  • Structured data & schema.org

Performance & UX

  • Core Web Vitals (PSI/Lighthouse)
  • Mobile usability auditing
  • Carbon footprint & rating
  • AMP validation
  • Accessibility auditing
  • Image optimisation & alt text

Analysis & AI

  • Internal linking & anchor text
  • N-grams content analysis
  • Semantic similarity analysis
  • Content cluster visualisation
  • Crawl comparison & tracking
  • AI content generation (OpenAI/Gemini)

What enterprise SEO leaders say

★★★★★

"We run scheduled overnight crawls of a 3-million-SKU catalogue and the regression report is waiting before standup. Nothing else lets an in-house team monitor a property this large without a cloud contract or per-URL bill."

Priya Nandakumar
Priya Nandakumar Head of Organic Growth, Marquee Retail Group
★★★★★

"Custom extraction pulls our price tiers and inventory into named columns and the CSV drops straight into Snowflake. It has quietly become the data source half our SEO dashboards depend on."

Daniel Okafor
Daniel Okafor Technical SEO Lead, Helio SaaS Platform
★★★★★

"Team licences let eight consultants share identical crawl configs across rotating engagements, and procurement signed off in one cycle because the data never leaves the operator's machine — decisive for our regulated accounts."

Sofia Reinholt
Sofia Reinholt SEO Director, Northwind Digital Agency
★★★★★

"On migrations spanning hundreds of thousands of URLs, the redirect mapping and staging-vs-production diff keep us out of trouble. It is the first tool we install on every new analyst's workstation."

Marcus Tran
Marcus Tran VP Search, Atlas Commerce Holdings
// Enterprise playbook · 2026

The enterprise case for Screaming Frog at SaaS & e-commerce scale

When a SaaS catalogue hits 500k URLs or a marketplace passes two million products, browser-tab crawlers stop working. Screaming Frog is the desktop spider that in-house SEO teams at enterprise retailers, B2B SaaS vendors and regulated publishers run nightly to keep technical hygiene under control without shipping a customer record to a third-party cloud.

This page lays out that playbook: how the screaming frog seo spider chews through million-URL crawls on one workstation, how a team licence is shared across consultants, how scheduled audits stream into BI dashboards via CSV export, and how to use screaming frog to improve on page seo where spreadsheets long since gave up.

Enterprise snapshot: screaming frog free covers 500 URLs for QA pods; the £199/yr Pro licence covers two machines per consultant and adds unlimited URLs, scheduled monitoring and CSV pipelines into Looker, Tableau or Snowflake.

Why it fits the enterprise stack

What is Screaming Frog for an in-house team at scale

What is screaming frog at enterprise scale: a desktop spider that crawls Shopify Plus-sized catalogues on one workstation, renders JavaScript with an embedded Chromium engine and writes the crawl into a local database that ingests into BigQuery, Snowflake or Power BI. Because the screaming frog seo tool runs on the operator's laptop, no PII or order data transits a vendor cloud — the case that lands it in finance, healthcare and government.

Enterprise seo screaming frog audits cover 300+ issue types across titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, hreflang, structured data, internal links, redirect chains, response codes and DOM weight. One licence replaces a sitemap generator, broken-link checker, redirect mapper, schema validator and log-file companion — each otherwise its own procurement cycle.

Version 24 · May 2026

The v24 capabilities that changed the enterprise workflow

Three v24 additions reshape how a 12-person SEO programme runs — the screaming frog seo spider features that justify the upgrade at million-URL scale.

MCP orchestration from Claude

Hand the spider to an AI agent: a PM asks Claude to "audit the new checkout flow against last week's baseline" and the screaming frog seo spider runs the crawl, diff and export — no GUI.

Nightly scheduled monitoring

Auto Compare crawls run unattended overnight, diff the prior run and email a regression report at 06:00 — redirect-chain and 404 alerts reach release managers before standup, zero analyst keyboard time.

Uncrawlable link detection

SPA frameworks hide navigation behind event handlers; the new report flags JS-injected URLs the spider cannot reach, exposing dead zones in large React storefronts.

The enterprise feature backbone sits underneath v24: JavaScript rendering via a built-in Chromium WRS for React, Angular, Vue and Next.js storefronts; custom extraction with XPath, CSS Path and regex to pull SKUs, price tiers and inventory counts into named columns; and a full GA4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights API overlay joining traffic, CTR and Core Web Vitals to every URL.

A built-in structured-data validator handles schema.org and Google rich-result checks, and the companion log-file analyser shows how Googlebot spends crawl budget across faceted-navigation parameters — the biggest indexation problem at scale.

Team licensing

Screaming Frog pricing for in-house teams

Screaming frog pricing scales linearly per consultant — the reason it survives finance review at large organisations. Each Pro seat covers two installs, so a senior SEO runs identical configs on a laptop and a workstation without paying twice.

Free forever
£0/yr · no sign-up

Screaming Frog Free

  • Up to 500 URLs — ideal for QA pods spot-checking new templates
  • All core SEO reports for proof-of-concept rollouts
  • XML sitemap generator for staging environments
  • Response codes & canonical analysis on release branches
  • Mac, Windows and Linux runtime parity
  • No trial countdown — usable on any developer laptop
Pro licence
£199/yr · ~$250 USD

Pro & Team licences

  • Unlimited URLs — proven at 2M URLs on 32 GB workstations
  • JavaScript rendering for headless storefronts
  • Custom extraction (XPath, regex) for SKU/price/inventory columns
  • GA4, Search Console, PageSpeed and Ahrefs APIs
  • Scheduled crawls, Auto Compare and CSV export for BI pipelines
  • One seat covers two machines per consultant
Cross-platform

Screaming Frog on Mac vs Windows

Native builds for Mac, Windows and Linux mean a mixed-hardware team gets identical reports whoever is at the keyboard. The only practical differences are install paths and how much memory you hand the crawler — which matters once a crawl tops a million URLs.

Screaming Frog on MacUniversal binary · M1 → Tahoe

Shipped as a notarised universal binary across macOS Monterey (12) through Sequoia (15) and Tahoe (26). The Apple Silicon advantage is real — an M3 Pro finishes a 100k-URL rendered crawl in roughly half the time of a comparable Intel Core i9, which compounds across enterprise catalogues.

Lift the default 2 GB heap under Configuration → System → Memory before pointing it at production. Binaries live at /Applications/Screaming Frog SEO Spider.app, the database under ~/Library/Application Support/Screaming Frog SEO Spider/.

Screaming Frog on Windows64-bit Win 10 & Win 11

On 64-bit Windows 10 and 11 the same Configuration → System → Memory dialog governs throughput. A 32 GB workstation can hand 16 GB or more to the heap — that headroom is what makes multi-million-URL database-mode crawls viable on a desktop, not a server cluster.

Files install to C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ with the database under %APPDATA%\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\. No feature is platform-locked — every report, API integration and scheduled job behaves identically on Windows and Mac.

vs the alternatives

Screaming Frog vs Ahrefs, SEMrush, SE Ranking, DeepCrawl

Procurement teams weigh up screaming frog vs ahrefs, ahrefs vs screaming frog and screaming frog vs semrush — yet these tools rarely overlap. Most enterprise stacks budget for a desktop crawler and a cloud research suite together; each owns a job the other was never built for.

vs Ahrefs
Is ahrefs like screaming frog? Not really. Ahrefs is a hosted suite anchored on its backlink index, keyword corpus and rank tracker. Its Site Audit is the nearest equivalent, yet it runs on Ahrefs infrastructure and meters audits against a URL quota. The screaming frog seo spider does no keyword research — it is a crawler, but one that runs locally and never bills per URL.
vs SEMrush
Overlap is limited to the audit module Screaming frog vs semrush comes down to one shared surface: the SEMrush Site Audit. Everything else SEMrush sells — keyword research, competitive intelligence, PPC tooling — sits outside what a desktop crawler does, so large teams run both rather than choose.
vs SE Ranking
Budget cloud suite, not a desktop crawler Se ranking vs screaming frog pits a cheaper hosted Ahrefs/Semrush rival against the crawl-only seo screaming frog. SE Ranking bundles a Site Audit too, but the same constraint applies — metered cloud crawling versus unlimited local crawls bounded only by RAM.
vs DeepCrawl
The genuine enterprise head-to-head Screaming frog vs deepcrawl (now Lumar) is the comparison that matters for large organisations. DeepCrawl is a cloud crawler with unlimited URLs, hosted scheduling and shared workspaces. The screaming frog alternative case favours DeepCrawl when you continuously monitor well past 1M URLs; under that ceiling the desktop tool is faster to spin up and far cheaper per crawl.
Five-pass audit workflow

How to use Screaming Frog to improve on page SEO

At enterprise scale, how to use screaming frog to improve on page seo is less a one-off audit than a repeatable five-pass routine you codify once and then schedule to run on its own.

Render the full production crawl

Switch on Configuration → Spider → Rendering → JavaScript and use database storage mode so a million-URL property fits on disk. Rendering exposes content a raw HTML pass misses.

Prioritise by business impact, not issue count

From Reports → Crawl Overview, segment by template or revenue line. A duplicate title on 40k category pages outranks a missing H1 on one legal page — fix in the CMS, then re-crawl staging.

Layer in Search Console & GA4

Authorise the integrations under Configuration → API Access so impressions, CTR and sessions sit beside each URL — the overlay you use to defend remediation spend to stakeholders.

Ship a clean XML sitemap

Use Sitemaps → XML Sitemap to generate from the validated crawl, drop redirected and 404 URLs, then push to Search Console as part of the release checklist.

Hand the recurring crawl to the scheduler

Register a nightly or weekly job with Auto Compare on; the regression diff lands in the team inbox automatically. Identical behaviour across all three OSes lets any operator own the rota.

Codify this once and a sprawling property polices itself between releases. Grab the latest build below.

Crawl 500 URLs free, then scale to your whole estate

The desktop SEO crawler enterprise teams standardise on. No sign-up to evaluate; shared licences when you scale. Windows, macOS, Linux.

Free Download — v24.0
Windows macOS Linux

Free · Up to 500 URLs · No sign-up required

Frequently asked questions

Yes — free to download, no sign-up or expiry, with the full core audit suite on the 500-URL free tier. It is the no-cost way for an enterprise team to run a proof-of-concept before buying shared licences for unlimited crawling.
The free tier covers 500 URLs per session — enough for a QA pod to spot-check a new template or validate a single site section. A paid licence lifts the cap entirely; teams routinely run crawls into the millions of URLs on a well-provisioned workstation.
It runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux, with native Arm64 Linux added in version 24 — handy for teams that automate crawls on Arm-based cloud instances. The 64-bit build is a single download that behaves identically across all three platforms.
Released 19 May 2026, version 24.0 shipped MCP (Model Context Protocol) so AI agents can drive crawls, Auto Compare between scheduled runs, crawl-delta email alerts with export attachments, uncrawlable link detection, a usage-statistics dashboard and native Arm64 Linux builds — squarely aimed at automated, team-scale workflows.
Yes — an embedded Chromium Web Rendering Service executes pages so the crawler reaches content on React, Angular, Vue, Next.js and other component-driven storefronts. Rendering is a per-crawl toggle, so teams can run fast raw-HTML passes for monitoring and full renders for deep audits.
Yes — native connectors for Google Analytics 4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights join traffic, impressions, CTR and Core Web Vitals to each URL, and the merged dataset exports to CSV for ingestion into Looker, Tableau, Power BI or a warehouse.