What is Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based website crawler used by SEO professionals to audit and analyse technical SEO issues. Officially known as the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, the tool simulates how search engine bots crawl a website and extracts key data points to identify problems related to structure, metadata, links, and more.
It’s available in both free and paid versions and is particularly popular for on-site SEO auditing and technical optimisation tasks.
Why Screaming Frog Matters
Screaming Frog gives marketers deep visibility into how a website is constructed and where it may be underperforming from an SEO perspective. It helps uncover hidden issues that could block indexing, harm rankings, or reduce user experience.
Key benefits include:
- Crawling all internal and external links on a site
- Identifying broken links, redirects, and duplicate content
- Reviewing page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags
- Auditing crawl depth, canonical tags, and robots directives
- Exporting detailed reports for technical SEO analysis
It’s an essential tool for technical SEOs, agencies, and developers working to improve site health and performance.
Example in Use
An agency runs a Screaming Frog crawl for a client and discovers that many product pages are missing meta descriptions and have duplicate title tags. The tool also flags redirect chains that slow down load times. Using these insights, the team prepares a technical SEO roadmap to improve the site’s visibility and crawlability.
Screaming Frog acts as a powerful diagnostic tool in the SEO toolkit.
Related Terms
- Technical SEO
- Site Audit
- Metadata
- Broken Links
- Robots.txt