Screaming Frog SEO Spider

What is Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop-based crawler that analyzes your site technically: it identifies 404 errors, redirect chains, missing metadata, duplicate content, and structural issues.

Screaming Frog and AEO

Screaming Frog is critical for a technical AEO audit:

• Crawler access: Check that AI crawlers are not blocked (via robots.txt analysis)
• Schema analysis: Extract and validate schema markup across every page
• Canonical analysis: Verify that canonical URLs are correct
• Internal linking: Analyze the internal link graph and identify orphan pages
• Site speed: Integration with PageSpeed Insights for CWV data

Free vs. paid

Free version: crawl up to 500 URLs. Paid (£259/year): unlimited crawling, cloud crawling, and advanced reports.

FAQ

Can Screaming Frog verify schema markup? Yes. It can extract all JSON-LD on the site and report which types are implemented on which pages.

What’s most important to check for AEO? robots.txt configuration (that AI crawlers are not blocked), canonical URLs, and schema markup coverage.