Is Screaming Frog free? The 500 URL limit, explained

Is Screaming Frog free? Partly: the SEO Spider has a free version that crawls up to 500 URLs in a single crawl, and a paid licence at £199 per year removes that cap. If the reason you are asking is a quick check on one page, seogeoaeo.ai is the faster route, because it runs that check in the browser for a few credits with nothing to download.

That is the short answer. The rest of this page covers what the free tier leaves out and which tool to reach for in each case.

What the free version includes

Screaming Frog publishes the limits on its own SEO Spider page. The free download runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and crawls a site the same way the paid one does, up to the 500 URL mark. For a small marketing site or a docs subdomain, that is often enough to find 404s, server errors and missing titles.

What it leaves out

The cap is the limit most people notice, but it is not the only one. In the free version Screaming Frog also restricts:

• the crawl configuration options
• saving a crawl to open later
• JavaScript rendering
• custom extraction
• API integrations

So a free crawl of a single-page app may miss content that only appears after scripts run, and you cannot save the result to compare with next month's crawl.

When you do not need a crawler at all

A lot of SEO questions from developers are about one URL: did the deploy break a link, does the old path still redirect, is the new page's title too long. A crawler answers those, but you have to install it, set it up and wait for the crawl.

seogeoaeo.ai handles that kind of question as a single check. You paste a public URL and pick the tool:

• Broken Internal Link Finder: flags same-site links on the page that return 4xx or 5xx errors, 15 credits a run.
• Redirects, Headers & Host Checker: follows the redirect chain and checks that the http, https, www and bare versions of the host end at one URL.
• On-Page SEO Checker: reads the title, meta description, snippet and heading outline.

Each result comes with what to change, and you can call the same tools from a script over the REST API or from an AI coding assistant over MCP.

It is not a replacement for a full desktop crawl. If you need every URL on a large site, or custom extraction, the licensed SEO Spider is the better buy.

Which one to use

• One page, right now: seogeoaeo.ai.
• Small site, occasional audit: the free SEO Spider, as long as you stay under 500 URLs.
• Large site, regular audits, saved crawls: the paid SEO Spider licence.

FAQ

Is the Screaming Frog free version safe to use for client sites? It is the official download from Screaming Frog, with the same crawler as the paid version and fewer features. Get it from screamingfrog.co.uk rather than a third-party mirror.

How much does Screaming Frog cost? Its licence page lists £199 per licence per year, with lower per-licence prices when you buy several.

Is there a free way to check one page without installing anything? seogeoaeo.ai gives a free preview of a site's crawl, indexing, on-page and structured data health on its home page. Single tools such as the broken link check then run on credits.