Tools & Tracking

What is Screaming Frog and do I need it?

Updated April 19, 2026

Quick Answer

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that scans your site like Googlebot does and reports every technical issue: broken links, missing meta tags, duplicate content, redirect chains, missing alt tags, schema errors, orphan pages. Free for sites under 500 URLs, C$260 CAD/year for unlimited. Essential for any technical audit.

What Screaming Frog finds in 30 minutes

Every internal and external link, including broken (404) and redirected (301/302) links.

Every page's meta title, description, H1, canonical, robots directives, and word count — exportable for bulk auditing.

Schema markup validation across the entire site, with errors and warnings flagged.

Image issues: missing alt text, oversized files, broken sources.

Crawl depth and orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them, often indicators of forgotten content or architectural issues).

Power features for serious technical work

Connect to GA4, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs to overlay live performance data on the crawl.

Custom extraction with XPath or CSS selectors — pull any data point from your site's HTML at scale.

Comparison crawls: run before and after a deploy to instantly see what changed across the site.

JavaScript rendering for SPAs and heavy frontend frameworks.

Want this applied to your site?

Book a free 60-minute strategy call. We'll review your site live and walk you through exactly what to fix first.

Book a Free Call Get a Free SEO Audit

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