Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop-based website crawler built specifically for technical SEO audits and onsite optimization. It operates on Windows, macOS, and Linux, allowing users to download and crawl up to 500 URLs for free, with a paid license (around £199 per year) removing that limit and unlocking advanced features. The tool is used by SEO professionals, digital marketers, and web developers to systematically scan websites and identify issues that can affect search engine rankings. The core function of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is to crawl a website in a manner similar to how a search engine bot would, but with full control over crawl settings. Users can specify the starting URL, set crawl depth limits, define allowed or disallowed directories, and adjust speed limits to avoid overwhelming servers. The crawler respects robots.txt directives and meta robots tags, ensuring that the crawl adheres to the site’s intended accessibility. Once the crawl completes, the tool presents a detailed list of all discovered URLs along with a wide range of SEO-related data points. For each page, it shows the HTTP status code, content type, response time, file size, and the count of internal and external links. It also extracts and displays the HTML title tag, meta description, heading tags (H1 through H6), canonical URL, and Open Graph metadata. This allows users to quickly spot missing or duplicate title tags, overly long or short meta descriptions, multiple H1 tags, or missing canonical tags. The tool excels at detecting technical issues that can harm organic search performance. It flags broken internal links (4xx errors), redirect chains and loops, temporarily redirected URLs (302), and server errors (5xx). It also identifies pages with duplicate content based on exact mat