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 is the desktop website crawler that every technical SEO ends up running at some point in their career. Built by UK agency Screaming Frog Ltd, the tool downloads every URL on a website the same way a search engine does, then surfaces the issues that block ranking — broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, oversized HTML, slow Core Web Vitals, orphan pages and 300+ other technical defects.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs without sign-up, the paid licence removes the limit at £199 per year, and version 24 — released 19 May 2026 — adds Model Context Protocol (MCP) support that connects the crawler directly to Claude, LM Studio and other AI assistants. This page covers what is screaming frog at a practical level, how the screaming frog seo spider features stack against Ahrefs, SEMrush and DeepCrawl, screaming frog pricing in 2026, and how to use screaming frog to improve on page seo across both Mac and Windows installs.
Quick answer: Screaming Frog free crawls 500 URLs without sign-up. The paid licence (£199/yr) lifts the limit and adds JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, scheduling and API integrations.
What is screaming frog, in one sentence: a desktop spider that crawls any website, renders JavaScript with a built-in Chromium engine, and exports a complete inventory of every URL it found along with the SEO problems it spotted. Unlike cloud-based crawlers, Screaming Frog runs locally on your machine — Mac, Windows or Linux — which means your crawl data never sits on someone else's server, and there are no per-crawl row limits beyond what your RAM and licence allow.
The screaming frog seo tool reports 300+ distinct issue types across titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals, hreflang, structured data, internal links, redirects, response codes, page speed and rendered DOM size. Seo screaming frog audits typically replace dozens of single-purpose tools in one application — a sitemap generator, a broken-link checker, a redirect mapper, a schema validator and a log-file analyser all in one binary. For technical SEOs and content teams alike, the screaming frog seo spider is the on-disk source of truth for what search engines actually see.
The version 24 release in May 2026 introduced the biggest workflow upgrade since JavaScript rendering. Five additions matter most for daily work.
Connect the crawler to Claude, LM Studio or Cursor. Run crawls, exports and analyses through natural-language prompts. AI assistants drive your audit workflow end-to-end.
Scheduled crawls now automatically diff against the previous run. Email notifications include a full issue table — see which problems appeared, which resolved.
A new report flags JavaScript-injected URLs the engine cannot reach, plus syntactically invalid URLs like hppts://example.com. Catches issues humans miss.
Beyond v24: the screaming frog seo spider features set also includes JavaScript rendering through a built-in Chromium WRS (React, Angular, Vue, Next.js), custom extraction with XPath, CSS Path or regex for pulling any DOM element into a column, and full GA4, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights API overlay so traffic, CTR and Core Web Vitals sit next to every crawled URL.
A built-in structured-data validator covers schema.org and Google rich-result checks, and a separate log-file analyser companion app handles crawl-budget audits when you need to see how Googlebot actually moves through the site.
Screaming frog pricing is straightforward and unchanged since 2017. Pick the tier that matches your needs — both work identically; the paid licence simply removes the URL limit and unlocks advanced integrations.
The screaming frog seo spider ships native binaries for Mac, Windows and Linux. Feature parity is exact; the only real differences are platform-specific install paths and default memory allocation.
Screaming Frog runs as a notarised universal binary on macOS Monterey (12) through Sequoia (15) and macOS Tahoe (26). Apple Silicon Macs handle the JavaScript-rendered crawl noticeably faster than Intel — an M3 Pro crawls a 100k-URL JS site in roughly half the time of a comparably-clocked Intel Core i9.
Memory allocation defaults to 2 GB; raise it via Configuration → System → Memory. The app installs to /Applications/Screaming Frog SEO Spider.app and stores its database under ~/Library/Application Support/Screaming Frog SEO Spider/.
Screaming Frog runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit only). Default memory allocation is 2 GB; the same Configuration → System → Memory dialog raises the ceiling, and Windows installs typically reach 16 GB allocations without trouble on a workstation.
The installer drops to C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ and the database lives under %APPDATA%\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\. There is no Windows-only feature gap — every report and integration runs identically on Mac and Windows.
The most common comparison searches are screaming frog vs ahrefs, ahrefs vs screaming frog and screaming frog vs semrush — but they are not really competing in the same lane. Most agencies run both a crawler and a research platform side-by-side.
How to use screaming frog to improve on page seo comes down to a five-pass workflow that fits inside a single afternoon for most mid-sized sites.
Set Configuration → Spider → Rendering → JavaScript, then crawl the production domain. JS rendering catches dynamic content that plain HTML crawls miss.
Open Reports → Crawl Overview. Usually: missing meta descriptions, duplicate titles, broken internal links. Export each list, fix in CMS, re-crawl staging to verify.
Configuration → API Access. Overlay impressions, CTR and traffic on every crawled URL so you prioritise rewrites where they actually move the needle.
Sitemaps → XML Sitemap. Build from your clean crawl, exclude redirected and 404 URLs, submit to Search Console.
Set a weekly scheduled crawl with Auto Compare enabled. New issues surface in your inbox the day they appear — works identically on Mac and Windows.
This is the workflow that turns a 60-minute crawl into a measurable rankings move. Hit the Download button below to grab the latest build for Mac, Windows or Linux.
The industry's most trusted website crawler. No sign-up required. Available for Windows, macOS and Linux.