Screaming Frog: guide, features and pricing

What is Screaming Frog SEO Spider?

Screaming Frog is a British digital marketing agency that publishes several tools. The best known, the SEO Spider, is a crawler. It follows a site’s links page after page. For each URL, it collects the response code, tags, links and directives. The publisher claims more than 300 issues detected on its product page.

The software is installed on Windows, macOS or Linux, not in the browser. The size of the sites you can crawl therefore depends on your computer. The publisher also offers a Log File Analyser, a separate tool, covered in our article on SEO log file analysis.

Is Screaming Frog free or paid?

Both. The official pricing page, accessed on September 24, 2026, compares a free version and an annual per-user license. Here are the differences that matter in practice.

Feature	Free version	Paid license
Number of URLs per crawl	500	Unlimited, depending on memory and storage
Broken links, redirects, titles, meta, hreflang, exact duplicates, XML sitemap	Yes	Yes
Crawl configuration, saving and reopening crawls	No	Yes
JavaScript rendering	No	Yes
Crawl comparison, near duplicates	No	Yes
Structured data, custom extraction and custom search	No	Yes
Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights connection	No	Yes
Crawling assisted by OpenAI and Gemini	No	Yes

The unit price drops from five licenses. Expect £189 for 5 to 9 licenses, £179 for 10 to 19, and £169 for 20 or more, per license per year. The license lasts one year and renews. Each user needs their own license.

How do you run a first crawl?

1. Install the SEO Spider from the publisher’s site and check the memory available on your computer.
2. Choose the mode: “Spider” to crawl a site from a URL, “List” to check a specific list of URLs.
3. Configure the crawl (license): Googlebot Smartphone user-agent, JavaScript rendering if the site depends on it, robots.txt respected.
4. Enter the starting URL, usually the homepage, then launch with “Start”.
5. Read the tabs once the crawl is finished: Response Codes, Page Titles, Meta Description, H1, Canonicals, Directives.
6. Export the useful lists from each tab to share them with the technical team.

The user-agent setting has a purpose. Google has indexed the mobile version of sites since October 2023, according to its Search Central blog. Crawling as Googlebot Smartphone shows what Google sees.

On the hardware side, the publisher’s user guide gives two benchmarks. 8 GB of RAM is generally enough under 200,000 URLs. Beyond one million URLs, it recommends an SSD and 16 GB of RAM, in database storage mode.

Which SEO checks should you run with Screaming Frog?

A crawl produces dozens of reports. Three families of checks cover most of an audit.

Response codes and redirects

The Response Codes tab isolates 4xx and 5xx errors, redirects and chains. Google’s documentation on redirects (April 14, 2026) states it clearly: Google treats 301 and 308 as permanent, 302 and 307 as temporary. Fix every internal link that points to a redirect. Our article on the 301 redirect covers good practice in detail.

Tags and content

The Page Titles and Meta Description tabs flag missing, duplicate or overly long tags. To fix them, use our guide to the title tag. Near-duplicate detection (license) spots pages that are too similar, a topic covered in our article on duplicate content.

Depth, links and JavaScript rendering

The Crawl Depth column counts clicks from the homepage. A practitioner’s benchmark: a key page more than three clicks deep deserves to be moved up in the internal linking. On a JavaScript site, compare a crawl without rendering and a crawl with rendering. The gap shows what depends on JavaScript. Google describes how it works in its JavaScript SEO basics. Our article on JavaScript SEO draws the consequences.

Screaming Frog for an audit or a migration

In an audit, the SEO Spider is the basis for diagnosing crawling and indexing. Combined with Search Console, it surfaces orphan pages and pages that are crawlable but not indexed. The full approach is described in our technical SEO audit method.

In a migration, paste the old URLs into list mode. Check that each one returns a single 301 redirect to a page returning 200. The publisher’s user guide explicitly mentions this use. Our article on SEO migration shows where to place this check in the schedule.

The tool changes fast. Check the release history before following an old tutorial: features change with each major version.

What are the limitations of Screaming Frog?

• It is not Google: the tool follows your settings, not Googlebot’s crawling algorithm. Only logs show what Google actually crawls.
• Automatic issue prioritization (“High”, “Medium”) does not replace judgment: a minor warning can be ranked high.
• Very large sites require a powerful machine, or an online platform such as Oncrawl or Botify, priced on quote.

This crawler remains one tool among others in an audit process. Our SEO audit page places its role in the overall method.