Screaming Frog

screamingfrog.co.uk

YES

Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent.

A desktop crawler that walks a whole site and reports broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing metadata and everything else a technical audit needs.

Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

Build a crawler that runs in CI.

STACK
- A small Node crawler, or Playwright when the site needs JavaScript

CRAWLING POLITELY
- Respect robots.txt, one request at a time, an identifiable user agent
- Never crawl a site you do not own without permission

WHAT TO CHECK
- Broken internal links and redirect chains longer than one hop
- Missing or duplicate title and description
- Images with no alt text and no explicit width and height
- Pages with no inbound internal link, which are invisible to search

THE OUTPUT
- A JSON report and a table, plus a non-zero exit when any error-level check fails

RUN IT IN CI
- Against a preview deployment on every pull request
- A broken link caught before merge costs nothing; one found in production costs a ranking

Include the crawler, the check list and the CI step.

What you lose

A long list of checks accumulated over years, each one a lesson from a real site
Crawling at speed with JavaScript rendering when a site needs it
Integrations that pull analytics and search data into the crawl

If you would rather not build

A Playwright or Node crawler in CI

The escape hatch

open source · no votes, no paid placement

linkinator

Crawls a site and reports broken links; runs happily in CI.

JustinBeckwith/linkinatorfree · open source

Lighthouse CI

Runs Lighthouse audits on every build with budgets you set.

GoogleChrome/lighthouse-cifree · open source

Why this verdict

our own opinion · changed only by a person

80/100

Verdict yes at 80. A crawler and a dozen checks are a weekend, and running them in CI on every pull request beats a manual audit.

History

tracked since 10 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten

Interest · last 30 days

Nothing recorded yet. This chart fills in once the page has visitors, votes or prompt copies — it will not draw a flat line to look busy.

Questions about Screaming Frog

answered from the record above

Is Screaming Frog free?

No — the plan we track is $20 a month. Around £199 a year for the licence; the figure shown is roughly that divided by twelve in dollars.

Can you replace Screaming Frog by building your own?

YES. Replaceable in one session with an AI coding agent. Replacement score 80 out of 100, build time one session. Read what you lose before you decide.

How much does Screaming Frog cost?

$20 a month on Licence — $240 a year. Recorded 10 Aug 2026.

What do you lose by replacing Screaming Frog?

A long list of checks accumulated over years, each one a lesson from a real site; Crawling at speed with JavaScript rendering when a site needs it; Integrations that pull analytics and search data into the crawl. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.

Is there an open-source alternative to Screaming Frog?

Yes: linkinator, Lighthouse CI. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.

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