Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Opening Hook

Ever wonder what your website really looks like?

Not the pretty frontend. The messy, technical guts. Screaming Frog is like an MRI for your site. It crawls every single page. It finds every single error. It's the industry standard for a reason.

This is not a cloud-based, pretty dashboard tool. It's a dense, powerful desktop app. It runs on your machine. You control everything. This is for founders who want to get their hands dirty. And for developers tired of vague SEO requests.

It's the difference between guessing and knowing.

Key Features

Find Broken Links & Audit Redirects is its most famous job. Screaming Frog finds every 404 error. It shows you exactly where the broken link is. You can export a list for your team. It also maps out every redirect chain. This helps you fix loops and slow-loading pages. It's incredibly fast and thorough.

Then there's the JavaScript Rendering. This is huge for modern web apps. It uses a built-in Chromium browser. It crawls sites built with React, Angular, or Vue.js. It sees the content just like Google does. You can finally debug SEO issues on your SPA. This feature alone is worth the price.

My favorite is the Custom Extraction with XPath. This is a superpower. You can scrape any data from your site's HTML. Grab product prices, SKUs, or author names. Use XPath, CSS Path, or regex. It turns the crawler into a custom data-gathering machine. The possibilities are actually wild.

Finally, the API Integrations are amazing. Connect to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights. It pulls real user and performance data for every URL. You can see clicks, impressions, and Core Web Vitals. All right next to your crawl data. This gives you the full picture in one place.

Pricing & Value

They have a generous free version. You can crawl up to 500 URLs. This is perfect for small sites or quick checks. You can use it as many times as you want. It's a fantastic way to see the power.

The paid license is £199 per year. That's about $250. This unlocks unlimited crawling. You also get all the advanced features. Think scheduling, JS rendering, and API integrations. For an agency, this is a no-brainer. For a founder, it's less than one bad freelance hire. It's a serious tool for serious results.

Is it worth it? If your website is your business, yes. The time it saves you finding one critical error pays for it. It's cheaper than most cloud-based SEO tools. And it's often more powerful.

User Experience

The interface is... dense. Let's be honest. It looks like a spreadsheet from 2010. It is not beautiful. But it is incredibly functional and fast. There are tabs for everything. And I mean everything. You can filter and sort data in hundreds of ways. It's built for power users, not beginners. The learning curve is real. But once you get it, you feel like a genius.

Developer/Founder Experience

For developers, this tool is a gift. No more guessing what the SEO team means. You can see the exact redirect chain. You can find the source of a mixed content warning. The command-line interface allows for full automation. You can schedule crawls to run nightly. Then export the data directly to Google Sheets. It fits perfectly into a CI/CD workflow for pre-launch checks.

Founders, this is your secret weapon. Before a big launch or migration, run a crawl. Compare the staging site to the live site. You'll catch disastrous errors before they happen. The site architecture visualizations are also amazing. They help you understand your site's structure. You can see which pages are buried too deep. It gives you unmatched technical oversight.

Final Verdict

If you're a developer or founder who cares about technical SEO, try Screaming Frog now. The free version is a must-download. If you run a complex site or a web app, the paid version is a necessary investment. The one dealbreaker? If you hate desktop software and need a pretty UI, this isn't for you. For everyone else, this is the gold standard for a reason. Go crawl something.