The industry leading website crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux, trusted by thousands of SEOs and agencies worldwide for technical SEO site audits.
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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 crawler technical SEOs reach for when surface-level audits are not enough. The screaming frog seo spider parses raw HTML and rendered DOM side by side, validates canonicals against indexable status, checks every hreflang return-tag pair for reciprocity, flags mixed-content warnings on HTTPS pages, and surfaces soft-404 patterns that cloud platforms routinely miss. Each crawl produces an inventory of exactly what Googlebot would see, with 300+ distinct issue checks layered over the response.
The free tier covers 500 URLs per session without sign-up, the Pro licence lifts the cap and unlocks JavaScript rendering through a bundled Chromium WRS, and version 24 — released 19 May 2026 — adds Model Context Protocol (MCP) support so the engine can be driven from Claude, Cursor or LM Studio. This guide explains what is screaming frog at the engine level, how seo screaming frog catches the structural problems that block indexation, where screaming frog pricing lands in 2026, and how to use screaming frog to improve on page seo across Mac and Windows installs.
Quick answer: screaming frog free crawls 500 URLs without sign-up and runs the same 300+ technical checks as the paid build — canonicals, hreflang return tags, structured-data validation, mixed-content, soft-404 detection and orphan-page reports all included.
What is screaming frog, in technical terms: a desktop crawler that issues real HTTP requests, parses both raw HTML and the rendered DOM, follows canonical chains end-to-end, walks every hreflang cluster looking for missing return tags, validates inline JSON-LD against schema.org and Google rich-result rules, and writes every result to a local database you fully control. Because it runs on your machine — Mac, Windows or Linux — crawl data never leaves your laptop, and the only ceiling is the RAM you allocate.
The screaming frog seo tool surfaces 300+ technical defects per crawl: orphan pages absent from internal linking, soft-404s where the server returns 200 but the body is empty, redirect chains longer than two hops, mixed-content warnings on HTTPS templates, non-self-referencing canonicals, broken hreflang reciprocity, missing alternate links, structured-data validation errors, oversized HTML, slow Time to First Byte and dozens more. Seo screaming frog effectively replaces a sitemap generator, a redirect mapper, a schema validator, a hreflang cluster checker and a log-file analyser in one binary — the on-disk source of truth for what search engines actually see when they render the page.
The v24 release on 19 May 2026 sharpened the technical edge that defines the screaming frog seo spider features set. Three additions changed how deep audits get run.
Drive the crawler from Claude, Cursor or LM Studio via Model Context Protocol. Ask the LLM to crawl, diff schema markup, summarise hreflang errors and export the offending URLs — all without touching the UI.
Scheduled audits now diff against the previous run automatically. Regression reports land in your inbox with a delta on every technical metric — new canonical conflicts, new orphan pages, new hreflang return-tag errors.
Flags JS-only links the rendering engine cannot follow, plus malformed URLs like hppts://example.com. The spider catches when a Vue.js route returns 200 but renders zero indexable content — a classic soft-404 trap.
Deeper inspection layers: the screaming frog seo tool ships JavaScript rendering through a bundled Chromium WRS for React, Angular, Vue and Next.js sites, raw-vs-rendered DOM diff to spot mobile/desktop rendering gaps, and custom extraction with XPath, CSS Path or regex for pulling any DOM node into its own column.
A built-in structured-data validator verifies JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa against schema.org and Google rich-result rules, while the companion log file analyser ingests raw server logs to map Googlebot's actual crawl path against your sitemap — the only reliable way to spot crawl-budget waste.
Screaming frog pricing is unchanged since 2017 — a flat £199 per year for the Pro licence, free for crawls up to 500 URLs. Both builds run the same 300+ technical checks; the paid tier removes the URL cap and unlocks the integrations a deep technical audit actually needs.
The screaming frog seo spider ships native binaries for Mac, Windows and Linux. Feature parity is exact across the 300+ technical checks; what differs between platforms is install path, default memory ceiling and how comfortably each can render a million-URL JavaScript site.
The macOS build runs as a notarised universal binary on Ventura (13) through Sequoia (15) and macOS Tahoe (26). Apple Silicon shines on JS-rendered audits — an M3 Pro processes a 100k-URL Next.js crawl in roughly half the wall-clock time of a comparable Intel Core i9, because the bundled Chromium WRS scales linearly with available performance cores.
Memory defaults to 2 GB; for deep technical crawls on enterprise sites raise it under Configuration → System → Memory Allocation. The app installs to /Applications/Screaming Frog SEO Spider.app and stores its database under ~/Library/Application Support/Screaming Frog SEO Spider/.
The Windows build targets 10 and 11 (64-bit only). Workstations with 32 GB RAM routinely push the allocation to 16 GB inside Configuration → System → Memory, making Windows the comfortable choice for million-URL crawls where database mode keeps the on-disk index fast.
The installer writes to C:\Program Files (x86)\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\ and the database lives under %APPDATA%\Screaming Frog SEO Spider\. No technical-audit feature is platform-locked — canonicals, hreflang validation, log analysis and schema validation behave 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.