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Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog

Overview

Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in …
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My favorite SEO Tool

10 out of 10
August 25, 2023
Screaming Frog is used as a tool for primary analysis of site behavior by our Search and Analytics Team. We use it to crawl sites, debug …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Integration with web analytics tools (32)
    10.0
    100%
  • Multi-domain support (28)
    10.0
    100%
  • Site audit / diagnostics (50)
    9.6
    96%
  • Global SEO (27)
    9.0
    90%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Paid Version

$149.00

Cloud
per year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Demo

YouTube
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Features

SEO

Core features related to search engine optimization

8
Avg 7.8

SEO Channels

Features related to optimizing your website for specific channels

7.9
Avg 7.6

SEO Platform & Account Management

Features related to scalability and integration of the SEO platform

10
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

What is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog Video

Screaming Frog Demo

Screaming Frog Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(192)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool that has become indispensable for various user needs. Users appreciate its effectiveness in auditing client and internal websites, leading to business growth and improved site performance. It allows users to schedule automatic website crawls and receive the results via email, making it easier to identify regular technical issues without manual effort. The software offers a comprehensive solution for website audits and SEO analysis, streamlining operations and improving efficiency. It assists in identifying critical errors such as broken links, duplicate pages, and missing tags, facilitating website audits on a page level. Additionally, it helps users find pages that require attention and deep crawling for e-commerce sites. The software has garnered positive feedback from users who have found it easy to use, with a wide range of functionalities. It is highly recommended for digital marketing agencies and individuals conducting website audits.

Users have made several recommendations based on their experience with the software:

  1. The free version of the software is sufficient for making decisions and evaluating its usefulness.
  2. Purchasing the software is worth the money, as it provides comprehensive crawling capabilities.
  3. The software is recommended for companies of any size.
  4. It is suggested to try out the free version before committing to the premium subscription.
  5. The software is a great tool for finding 404 errors and checking meta data.
  6. Utilize the support documentation and forums for assistance.
  7. The software is great for internal SEO analysis and optimization.
  8. Try out the free version of the software.
  9. The software is recommended for crawling websites and gaining insights on content and keywords.
  10. Do not be intimidated by the technical aspects of the software and utilize available resources for guidance.
  11. The software is highly recommended for its cost-effectiveness and comprehensive website crawling capabilities.

Overall, users suggest taking advantage of the support documentation and forums provided by the software for assistance with any technical aspects and guidance.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 52)
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August 25, 2023

My favorite SEO Tool

Joe Preston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Screaming Frog is used as a tool for primary analysis of site behavior by our Search and Analytics Team. We use it to crawl sites, debug indexing issues on our sites, to vet site tagging, and to assess the SEO health of every part of the web site. We increasingly use it to identify specific content for text extraction. We recently studied outgoing links with it, we recently foxed some microcopy we couldn't find with other reporting processes.
  • Effectively and quickly assesses the scale of any problem that can be determined in the HTML source of a web site. Most sites of any age or of sufficient scale have numerous systems interacting to generate the source code. Screaming Frog's filters let you figure out where issues lie, and where they don't -- which can be key to solving for the issue.
  • Screaming Frog lets you crawl your site (and others - SHHHH) as Googlebot. If Googlebot can't get everywhere you want it to go, you can fix that.
  • Screaming Frog can effectively find duplicate content.
  • Screaming Frog can filter for HTML, Javascript, Images, I use custom filters all the time to find little bits of code. Great for Wordpress Plugin Issues.
  • It's a true SEO crawler. Reliable site-wide analytics on Metadata. You can find your canonicalization issues with this tag.
  • It will build XML sitemaps for you. Good ones!
  • The integrations with Lighthouse, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs!
  • It's slow on slow machines.
  • It's a bit of a resource hog.
  • It could go even further and add some intelligence and direction to it's wonderful analytics. No reason it couldn't provide recommendations.
  • I am still finding features I love on this application. You could say thats a good thing, but isn't kind of a bad thing -- i have used it so much!
There are a lot of SEO's who won't be helped meaningfully by this tool, until they understand the technical aspect of SEO. It can actually help you write better SEO copy, but it is more likely to be of use to someone who makes $ diagnosing canoicalization and duplicate content issues. There are better solutions available if you are limited to slow machines or connections.

There are a lot of false positives for 400 and 500 errors, basically don't go nuts over a few empty title fields, check carefully.

Chris Coultas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Screaming Frog simulates Google's crawling of a website, allowing us to see how search engines view our website. This includes what pages it can see, whether all the features of a pages are being considered and any pages that experience technical issues that would effect Googles view of those pages.
We use this to gather intelligence of our websites pages, ensuring that we can quickly see if anything is missing from Google's point of view, or anything isn't working. It also allows us to see quickly whether changes made on our Content Management System have actually taken place and are being detected by Google. With this in mind we can also quickly see all of the websites meta data, this is used to tell Google what a page is used for. So rounding all of this up quickly, in one place can quickly indicate whether any of this is out of date.
The tool is best used for SEO purposes, and while some of the technical information is useful for general website maintenance its most useful when concerned with how Google views a website and what technical issue might prevent is ranking better in search results. So it is a narrow use case in the grand scheme of website use, but very useful within its niche.


  • Screaming Frog is an excellent website crawler, creating accurate, up to date, assessments of all a websites pages
  • Screaming Frog is also a fantastic tool for looking at a websites architecture, so you can see which pages are taking priority and are the most well linked around the website.
  • Screaming Frog is also useful for creating an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google to help highlight key URLs
  • Screaming Frog is a software based tool (rather than all online like a lot of competitors) so it does take up memory on your computer, an online alternative would be very useful
  • When crawling bigger websites, the stability of crawls is less assured and they need to be crawled slowly to accurately retrieve all data. This can make it time consuming to review big websites.
  • Its a very technical tool and the interface and metrics referenced are not easy to understand at first. As such some indications in the tool itself of what each function does would be useful
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited to auditing brand new websites, when you need a quick, holistic view of the websites technical issues. Its great for providing a top line view of a websites architecture, perhaps for a new business approach where you need to assess the scale of work to maintain a website. Its also a useful tool in situations where you might need to see whether a large scale change in the website has taken place, you can see word counts, pages and their https response codes. Screaming Frog may be less useful if you need an idea of the customer experience on a website, it doesn't really provide information that helps assess how fast a website loads, what issues might come up when trying to convert or faults with the payment process. Screaming Frog is largely a technical SEO focused tool, it also can't assess the quality of a websites, layout or the quality of the content used on the website. As mentioned, its niche, but very useful within that niche.
Cole Watts | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows me to easily review and scan the Gflenv.com website (as well as other company websites), for all of its technical elements. This allows me to review it from an SEO perspective and to find any potential technical holes in the website, that need to be fixed.
  • Review Technical Elements of a Website
  • Review number of URLs on a website.
  • Review Pictures of a website.
  • No Training is provided w/ download of tool.
  • Not everyone likes the excel like format.
  • The number of tabs on the top can be a bit overwhelming for first time users.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool that is well suited, for scanning websites and for providing analysis of it. However, it is limited, to 100 URLs on the free version and it will not do the job or fix anything for you. It's simply a tool that helps you analyze data, you have to put the effort in to fix things.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to crawl our website for Technical SEO errors. It allows us to check our site's health on a large scale. Instead of having to check each page manually, we're able to do it all at once. Only our SEO team uses it currently, but we are often exporting the results of the crawl and sharing it with our Dev team for fixes that need to be made.
  • Find Broken Links.
  • Crawl Site and Analyze Meta Data.
  • Finding redirect chains and diagnosing technical errors.
  • Sitemap cleanup/generation.
  • UX/UI Improvements -- It's pretty ugly.
  • Crawl Map -- It's a new feature and is improving, but it's still not amazing.
Screaming Frog is an industry standard for dedicated site crawlers. All other crawlers are going to be compared to Screaming Frog, and for good reason. Screaming Frog is great for doing a quick crawl of a small site, or if you only need to look at a section of a site.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main use of this software is in tracking down broken links within a given website. Screaming Frog is able to crawl an entire site based on the home page, then look at external links on each page and find out where they are no longer working - returning a specific HTTP head error (such as 404). The crawl results can be saved, so it's easy to return to a previous project. The software also offers a lot of SEO insight including anchor texts, indexability, meta titles, H1 and H2 usage, word count, file size and more.
  • Scans all pages on a website.
  • Quickly extracts valuable insight about each page.
  • Clearly presents actionable SEO data.
  • Interface layout is dense and a little intimidating to a new user.
  • Slight learning curve to make the most of all the features.
If you're an experienced SEO consultant and know what to look for - you'll find a lot of actionable insights in this software. A single site scan can result in days worth of actionable work in improving site structure, content, HTML tags, outbound links and more.

A beginner in the field of SEO may struggle a bit as they don't know the implications of many pieces of data (such as H1 tag use). It is assumed that the user understands these concepts.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Screaming Frog to perform site audits on both our own corporate sites and competitor sites. It’s a handy way to surface issues like error pages, redirect chains, and a host of other concerns. It’s also a good way to find a list of all the URLs available on our sites.
  • You can easily scan any site.
  • With the paid version, there is no page limit for scans.
  • It provides a wide variety of information about the URL that you scan.
  • Reduce the amount of system resources each scan requires.
  • Create an easy way to compare multiple URLs to make competitive analysis easier.
  • Improve the backlink capabilities.
It works well for any sized business, thanks to the variety of information that it uncovers for whatever URL you research. I like how it’s industry-agnostic and how it lets you research both your own site(s) as easily as competitor sites. I do wish there was an easy way to research multiple URLs (or at least two) to do some real competitive analysis.
Brynna Baldauf | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team and I use Screaming Frog to crawl websites to better understand the site hierarchy, unravel internal linking structures and verify live links across hundreds of domains. We can also easily find and download page titles, descripts and H1 tags in addition to the canonical links a page. What you can do with Screaming Frog is really limited by your imagination and desires. Our entire SEO team uses the product with every client that we touch and as a whole, the company has integrated Screaming Frog into every phase of the sales funnel. Our sales team uses it to estimate how big a site is and how many hours might be needed while our marketing team uses it to find the best placement for creative materials. It helps us to find information on a site without manually sifting through each webpage.
  • Check status codes for a set of URLs - Simply copy and paste the URLs into the open box and within minutes you are able to see the status code, response time and potential redirects for any of the URLs. While there are online versions of this, Screaming Frog has the best copy/paste option and includes any other URL data you might need as well.
  • Crawl URLs for a Custom Text - Without developing your own spider, there is no other way to do this other than visit each URL individually. This has saved us countless hours verifying proper analytics code implementation across an entire website and finding client mentions across hundreds of links.
  • Finding Canonical Links - Every time Screaming Frog crawls a link or site they report back the basic information which happens to include canonical links. Again, without building your own spider or reviewing hundreds of URLs it would be a lengthy task to find all of this information.
  • Customizing the crawler - It takes a little bit of playing around with the settings to understand what each of them controls and what options need to be checked or unchecked to get the right amount of information.
  • Cannot Crawl a large site - Screaming Frog runs out of memory when asked to crawl a large site, even after playing around with memory settings and allocating additional memory.
I would recommend Screaming Frog for anyone looking to crawl a large number of URLs or a small to medium size site. It does not handle large sites as well, as it runs out of memory, even with custom memory allocation. To crawl a large site I would recommend Xenu instead - you get less information but it can verify a larger number of URLs without running out of memory.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to check technical SEO factors of various company websites. It helps us to recognize any issues, errors, or opportunities with our sites to be able to better optimize them. Screaming Frog gives us all the technical information we need to be able to make our websites better, basically!
  • Very fast to crawl a site.
  • Tons of features.
  • Not flashy: Everything is data driven which is great.
  • Fast
The screaming frog would be suited to anyone looking to improve the SEO of their website.nI think it is more geared toward the technical side of SEO
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to analyze clients' websites prior to us building them a new site. With Screaming Frog SEO Spider I can look at the sitemap of a site very easily and discover any hidden pages that may exist on that website. Overall it is a pretty useful tool that our Implementation department utilizes quite frequently.
  • Finding sitemaps
  • Seeing what pages are classified as
  • Easy to use
  • Old look and feel
  • Can be overwhelming amount of information
  • Have a guide or tutorial
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is especially helpful when analyzing the SEO of a particular website. We need to do this because when we are building clients new websites we don't want to miss any pages that could be hidden. Those pages could be important and this helps us streamline the website building process.
Mubin Saiyed | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is [the] one-stop solution for website audit. It is Quick, reliable, and user-friendly. It provides all the technical and on-page details. Helps in quickly optimizing the website. Shows most of the required data [that] any SEO would need.
  • User Friendly
  • Quick
  • Provides Detailed Data
  • Providing more suggestions [on] how things can be improved
If you a looking for a quick and detailed audit the best tool to use is Screaming Frog SEO Spider!
April 22, 2020

Screaming Frog SEO

Rolly Chin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is used by SEO Specialists in the whole organization. With Screaming Frog, we get crawling and indexing issues to be solved.
  • It is easy to use.
  • Can be integrated with Google Lighthouse
  • Can be integrated with Google Search Console
  • We can extract some extra information from our website.
  • It is not a cloud software.
  • For large websites we need to wait a lot.
Screaming Frog SEO is well suited for small and medium websites. But for large websites, it is not.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Screaming Frog SEO Spider to audit our content across over a dozen websites under our company. The Digital Marketing team is using it. It’s helping us evaluate our content and organize the details of all of it, so we can make data-driven decisions promptly without having to do a manually report for all of our sites (each with about 200-1,000+ pages)
  • Help pull more historical data (it only pulls “Last Modified”).
  • Have an option to “hide” PDFs from the link score/crawl analysis.
If you’re trying to overhaul your website, redesign it, or improve SEO, and you don’t have the budget to work with an agency, Screaming Frog SEO Spider isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s a requirement. It’s time-saving and lets the users focus on analyzing data instead of spending countless hours pulling data and building audit spreadsheets from scratch.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog SEO Spider in our marketing team to solve a number of website related problems. We initially started using Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl websites we were working on to develop a list of pages, titles, meta data, and more. We use this data as a basis for our website content audits.
  • Website crawling.
  • Meta data extraction.
  • Free version limited.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is great for web development teams and SEO teams. For web development teams, Screaming Frog SEO Spider provides data that will become the basis of your content audit. For SEO teams, you can use the crawled data to analyze titles, meta descriptions and more in bulk, without visiting from page to page.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for technical SEO audits, checks, and QA. It has helped us scale efforts in those areas.
  • Audit redirects en masse - important bc stuff like that would take forever to do manually.
  • Site launch audits - again, it would take forever to check the technical aspects of a site launch manually.
  • Site speed measurement could be added/approved. Current page speed functionality is helpful at times but could be more robust.
It is well suited for anyone who deals with SEO at an organization. It is also well suited for large websites such as e-commerce sites.
Scott Walker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When doing SEO for any of our websites, I like to start by using Screaming Frog to crawl the site. This gives me a starting point to examine meta data, see how discoverable the pages are on the website, and build the sitemap for submission. This is especially useful on web platforms that don't have their own sitemap generator.
  • Sitemap building.
  • Site crawling.
  • The UI is a bi confusing, especially for the uninitiated.
  • Though very customizable, default settings can cause server issues due to high traffic.
Screaming Frog is a go-to tool for SEOs. If you're in charge of your company's SEO strategy and you aren't buying into one of the larger SaaS systems like Moz, then Screaming Frog is almost a necessary tool. Not only does it build your sitemap for you to host on the website and submit to the search engines, but it also allows you to find all the metadata like page titles and descriptions, discover broken links or non-navigable pages, and find all your current redirects.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our digital agency uses Screaming Frog to help with website audits specifically for SEO related information including metadata, URLs, page titles, response codes, etc. We also use the tool for new website launches to crawl the current site and export URLs to aid with the creation of 301 redirects when necessary.
  • Website crawler is solid, making it easy to export into a spreadsheet.
  • Analyzes page titles and meta data of your website to help with SEO.
  • The UI is a little dated but has improved in recent years.
  • Not as intuitive for new users, requires some getting used to and experimenting.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is perfect for digital agencies and/or digital teams that need to perform technical SEO audits and crawl websites to identify the site URLs, duplicate content, robots directives and other technical information relevant to optimizing a website or launching a new website. If you are looking for a Moz-like SEO tool, this is not for you. This tool is really more of a crawling tool than it is an SEO tool.
Frank Watson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Having been doing SEO for 20 plus years - Screaming Frog SEO has been a tool that since it first launched that I have used consistently. It crawls a site and gives insights into all areas that technical SEO needs to examine. I highly recommend this tool - use it - learn how to read the numbers and develop responses to the information - whether it is duplicate tags and content, use of H tags, internal and external linking - the tool covers all the areas you need to improve the organic rankings of your site
  • Check title and description lengths
  • See duplicate title and descriptions
  • Could break results out into categories to streamline and quicken the process.
  • The schema information is lacking.
I use Screaming Frog SEO for specific things - tags, content, links - the areas they do not cover there are other tools to use.
Jeff Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is our go-to audit tool when first looking at a potential new project. Even the free version of Screaming Frog is quite useful. It is used company-wide and it the fastest way we have found to get a good "look" at the on-page health of a site. And with the paid version it allows integration with Google Analytics and Search Console (WMT). With SF and Google Sheets you can build a fairly comprehensive overview of metas, alt tags, image size, titles, H tags, etc. in a very short amount of time.
  • A solid crawler with a lot of options.
  • Allows one to see the core SEO elements of a site very quickly.
  • The paid version is a bit pricey but for what it does it's worth it.
  • The UX can see a bit confusing at first, but once you begin to use it the learning curve is quick.
If you are doing SEO audits, I think Screaming Frog is the best first-line tool for looking at a site. I have not found another tool that is capable of doing what Screaming From can in a very short amount of time. I do not use it for Looking at the technical side of a site, there are better tools for that. But for getting a feel for how well a site has been maintained as far as core on-site factors and being able to pull that data to build spreadsheets, SF is the best I have found.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used by the SEO department for crawling and website troubleshooting needs. It helps us see all URLs on a site. It helps us notice if there is missing or duplicative metadata. It helps identify 404s or other issues with URLs. It also helps generate an xml sitemap file.
  • Crawling an entire website
  • Gathering all URLs on the site
  • Telling you where a 404ing URL was found on the site
  • It crashes sometimes when you first open it
It is very useful for situations where you want to see all URLs on a site. It's very useful for when you're re-launching a website and need to gather all the URLs on the site. It's useful after launching a site to see if there are any broken 404ing URLs on the site. It's also useful for seeing if you're missing any titles, descriptions, etc. or if any meta data is duplicate. You can also filter results based on specific criteria, such as "show me all urls with titles that say _____". It's not useful for finding exactly where a 404ing URL is linked to on your site (at least, not to my knowledge).
Alyssa O'Mara | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Screaming Frog for every one of my clients. It allows me to quickly see if there are any underlying issues with their web pages that can be addressed to help with their rankings or usability. One crawl and I can filter in many ways to view just the data I need.
  • Allows me to see what pages can be indexed by the search engines
  • Shows me quickly if there is any meta information missing
  • If I am working with a larger site it's difficult to get Screaming Frog to scan the whole site. I have to stop the scan and reset some settings to get it to work and even then I have had issues.
Screaming Frog is great when you know what you're looking for. If you don't understand meta information, status codes, reditects, canonicals and other technical aspects of a website, then it's not the tool for you. It won't have a popup that gives you guidance, it just gives you the data, in an organized fashion, so that you can do the research you need to optimize a website. If you are newer to SEO you either need to learn what all of these things are, or use another tool that will put the results into layman's terms.
Dragan Nikolic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization specializes in marketing and website audits. Screaming Frog is the first thing we fire up when investigating a website, be it our client or the competition. This way we immediately see how a website is perceived in the eyes if Google, what pages are properly indexed or not, title and meta tags and even Google Analytics data.

Screaming Frog is the perfect diagnostics tool for any website auditor and a starting point for any digital marketing campaign.
  • Website crawling - see any website the way search engines see it.
  • Technical SEO - find out which pages have difficulties being indexed and improve alt tags, canonical tags, redirects, Schema.org, sitemaps, etc.
  • Onsite SEO - improve title tags, header tags, description tags, etc.
  • Exporting data - not the best way of naming the files you export, also you cannot export graphs that are generated in the sidebar.
  • Crawling large websites - it takes a lot of memory and takes a lot of time (sometimes days), they could consider creating a SaaS for these cases.
  • Doesn't crawl content so no data regarding duplicate or similar content is generated.
Screaming Frog is a great starting point for any website audit. It gives you almost everything you need to know for improving your onsite SEO. If you have difficulties determining what slows down your progress or you suspect that there are some technical issues with your website, Screaming Frog is the software for you.

If you're suspecting that you've been a victim of a bad linkbuilding practice, then Screaming Frog won't help you, as it has no offsite data.
Tom Pick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use as part of my audit process with every new client as well as clients looking to develop new websites. It is ideal for capturing all of the pages on the site along with meta information, different page types, finding 301 redirect issues, word counts, meta tag character counts, and much more.
  • Fast crawling even on large websites.
  • Comprehensive listing of pages of all types, not just HTML.
  • All meta tag information including character counts.
  • Page word counts in order to identify thin-content pages.
  • Would be great to have backlink information.
  • Would be great to get more guidance on what words or phrases a page should be optimized for.
  • Would be great to identify pages with duplicate or extremely similar content.
I use this as part of every website audit process. It's ideal for functions like finding missing meta description tags,duplicate title tags, and other simple issues. It's also helpful that the tool shows word count for every page on the site to find pages with thin content that are bad from an SEO standpoint.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used in the search and analytics department. I use it for crafting pitches - getting insights on possible site issues on a client site - troubleshooting any site issues for active clients, and completing audits, particularly tracking internal linking webs, scraping metadata, and assessing status code issues - both within the web app and in Excel spreadsheets.
  • I love the ability to scrape all internal links on the site - even with anchor text! Great for troubleshooting site circulation.
  • The Building Tree view is useful for quick visualization of the site structure.
  • I just love being able to scrape all the metadata - makes the setup for optimization super easy.
  • The Crawl Tree Graph always seems like it would be great, but the output is extremely unwieldy
  • Sometimes the status codes come out wrong - I always feel the need to double-check a few, when I end up with a list of 404s—and often I need to run them again in list mode to get the proper code. Not sure why!
  • I wish you could save a crawl within the platform - say I crawl a site, then crawl a different one, and want to poke around within the platform at that first site again. It seems I just have to perform the crawl again, rather than being able to load up an old crawl.
Screaming Frog is fantastic for digging in for an SEO audit. It's the first thing I do when I start looking at a site—throw the domain in the Screaming Frog. Then I can export a few views and start sorting by status code, empty or duplicate metadata, canonicals, etc. Filtering the URLs allows me to get a good handle on the URL hierarchies. I can knock out a big chunk of the technical audit in a few steps with Screaming Frog!
November 07, 2019

Screaming Frog Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Screaming Frog to give a high-level overview and almost a self-audit style report on our site health. Screaming Frog's crawling capabilities make pulling reports quick and convenient. The content of the reports gives us a total aerial snapshot of site pages and allows for quick changes to be made.
  • Quick crawls.
  • The free version is pretty comprehensive.
  • Reports able to pull in CSV format.
  • Premium version could be cheaper.
  • Integration with other analytics tools - Currently just GA.
  • A scheduling option for the free version would be great.
Screaming Frog is a great lightweight tool for pulling quick reports and giving a great snapshot of how your site is performing from a health perspective. Lots of great features and does pretty much everything one would want from an SEO tool. The free version is really comprehensive and this tool should be in the roster of every SEO team.
Robbin Block | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Screaming Frog is essential to providing SEO services to all my clients. We also use it for gaining insights about our own website. It's great for winning potential clients because it very quickly and easily reveals issues with their websites. And finally, it's just good for making the back-end of any website transparent, which is helpful for other aspects of marketing, i.e., exploring the competition.
  • It has a reliable user interface that makes it easy and fast to scan a website.
  • Reveals issues and opportunities for website optimization.
  • It allows you to filter results, so you can drill down to where the problems are.
  • You can export lists, so clients can either fix issues themselves or it's "proof" of what you're working on for them.
  • There's a bit of jargon in terms of labeling, and with so much data available, it would be nice to have "inline" explanations of what we're looking at.
  • Perhaps better graphical representations of the data, which would be helpful when explaining it to clients.
  • Maybe offer recommendations for fixing issues that are found with a website?
Screaming Frog is the perfect tool for getting into the backend of a website. It's easy to use, at the right price point (the free version is robust), and it's always being updated, so you can rely on it to be current. It's suitable for anyone needing to optimize a website, doing competitive research, and exploring opportunities to help clients (and sell services to new ones).
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