Looking for the best SEO crawlers to audit your site? Read on.
An SEO web crawler helps you unearth technical and on-page SEO problems, so you can quickly fix any issues and ensure search engine bots are crawling all your optimized pages.
But with loads of tools on the market, how do you choose the best one for your requirements?
In this article, I’ll share the best tools for crawling websites of any size, from small local business websites to huge enterprise sites with millions of pages.
The goal here is not to list every SEO web crawler on the planet.
That wouldn’t help at all!
Instead, I’ll share a tried-and-tested shortlist of web crawling tools that’ll let you audit and optimize your sites so that they’re getting indexed and ranking in the organic search results.
The 9 best SEO web crawlers:
Disclaimer: This article does contain some affiliate links. If you purchase a tool through one of my links I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Affiliate links are followed by (aff) in this article. Thanks for the support!
Key Considerations When Choosing an SEO Crawling Tool
When it comes to crawling websites, not every business has the same requirements.
Some will be fine with basic technical and on-page checks, while others will need more advanced tools to crawl larger and more complex sites.
Here are a few key features to consider when evaluating which SEO crawler to buy.
Ease-of-use
Make sure the SEO crawler is easy to use. For example, does it have a visual dashboard so that you can quickly dive in and prioritize the most critical issues? Plus filtering options to find the data you need?
Scalability
Do you need a tool that can crawl enormous sites? Different apps have different crawling limits, so make sure you choose a tool that can scale as needed.
For example, Semrush can crawl up to 1M pages on advanced plans, whereas an enterprise SEO crawler like Botify can crawl up to 50M URLs.
Crawl speed
The last thing you want is to be waiting hours or days to crawl large sites, so it’s essential to check the crawler speed.
For example, an enterprise-level crawler such as Botify can crawl 250 URLs per second.
Crawl modes
How flexible does the web crawler need to be?
For instance, consider whether you only need to crawl sites by dropping in a single domain or you need the ability to crawl lists of URLs, like you can with the Screaming Frog List Mode, or perhaps from a sitemap.
Crawl configurations
Sometimes you don’t need to crawl the entire website. Maybe you’re only interested in a specific set of URLs or subfolders, or perhaps you want to ignore URLs with particular tags.
Check whether you can set custom crawl configurations that allow you to include and exclude specific subfolders and URLs.
Crawl comparisons
The best SEO crawlers will allow you to compare crawls and track progress over time.
JavaScript rendering
More sites are being rendered with JavaScript, so this might be another criterion you need to consider.
Integrations
Check whether the web crawler can pull in third-party data from sites such as Google Analytics, Google Pagespeed Insights, and Search Console so that additional layers of information can be accessed.
For example, Semrush pulls in Google Analytics data so that you can prioritize working on pages that get the most traffic. While Screaming Frog has API connections with Google Analytics, Search Console, Pagespeed Insights, and Ahrefs, so you can map traffic, web vitals, links, and conversion data to URLs in the web crawl process.
These types of integrations are critical for technical content audits.
Reporting
Consider whether you need a web crawler that allows you to create branded reports for clients or internal teams.
9 Best SEO Web Crawlers for 2021
Let’s take a look at the key features of the best SEO web crawlers.
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a powerful desktop website crawler that allows you to crawl websites of any size quickly and efficiently. It’s trusted by thousands of SEOs and agencies worldwide, including Apple, Disney, and Google, to gather vital onsite data and let you make informed decisions in real-time.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl as Googlebot, Bingbot, mobile user agents, or your own custom UA.
- Map third-party data points from Google Analytics, Search Console, Pagespeed Insights, Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic for enhanced reporting.
- Discover duplicate and thin content.
- Compare historical crawl data to track technical SEO progress.
- Compare staging against production sites, detect changes in key elements and metrics, and examine site structure.
- Crawl dynamic, JavaScript-rendered websites and frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.
- Crawl and validate AMP URLs using the built-in AMP Validator.
- Save and re-upload crawl configurations and/or reports.
- Audit hreflang implementation, including missing confirmation links, inconsistent and incorrect languages codes, and non-canonical hreflang.
- Analyze technical and on-page problems, including missing or duplicate data, broken links, blocked resources, server errors, and redirect issues.
- Visualize site architecture patterns so you can pinpoint internal linking and URL structure issues.
- Crawl unlimited URLs (dependent on allocated memory and storage).
Pricing: Screaming Frog costs £149.00 per year.
Deepcrawl
Deepcrawl is an enterprise-level SEO web crawler that lets you see all your crawl data, analytics, and actionable insights in one powerful, easy-to-use, scalable platform. It’s the technical SEO tool of choice for leading enterprise brands, including Adobe, PayPal, and IBM.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl sites containing tens of millions of URLs and billions of links.
- Schedule regular crawls (hourly, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) to find and fix any new technical issues.
- Get automated recommendations and actionable SEO insights.
- Set up and prioritize tasks in the Task Management module for different team members.
- Generate visual reports so that it’s easier to spot actionable insights.
- Export Deepcrawl data to your data warehouse using either APIs and third-party connectors or official BI and Google Data Studio connectors.
Pricing: Pricing available on request.
Semrush
Not only is Semrush (aff) one of the top web crawlers, but it’s also a leading all-in-one platform for SEO, PPC, and competitor research.
While it may not have as many of the crawl configuration options as dedicated web crawlers like Screaming Frog, it does provide one of the better auditing tools of any all-in-one platform. It includes 40+ digital marketing tools and reports and is trusted by some of the world’s leading brands, including Walmart, Tesla, and P&G.
Key web crawling features:
- Customize the crawler for specific user agents, disallow specific URLs or folders, ignore URL parameters, and bypass web restrictions (password-protected sites).
- Crawl from multiple sources, such as the domain, sitemaps, or lists of URLs.
- Customize crawl speed.
- Crawl and analyze competitor backlink profiles, keywords, top traffic URLs, and even top traffic channels.
- Schedule automatic crawls (once, daily, weekly) or run manually.
- Track progress and compare crawls over time.
- Get a complete list of weighted crawl issues (errors, warnings, and notices), broken links, duplicate content, thin content, orphan pages, hreflang implementation errors.
- Connect to Google Analytics to get traffic data for URLs and prioritize your money pages.
- Integrate with task management tools, such as Trello, so you can send tasks straight from the Site Auditor to Trello.
Pricing: Semrush has a range of subscription plans (aff), starting at $99/month.
Sitebulb
Sitebulb’s powerful SEO web crawler is well-suited for both small and large websites. The tool’s user-friendly interface and visual reporting will help you audit websites faster, and communicate your findings more effectively to clients and team members.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl sites of any size, including websites built in a Javascript framework such as AngularJS and ReactJS.
- Crawl multiple sources, including pages from XML sitemaps, or pages found in Google Analytics.
- Generate a list of prioritized Hints (recommendations).
- Use audit scores to get context and create executive summaries for clients and management.
- Track historical trends and changes for any metric to see what has changed since your last audit and use graphs to demonstrate improvements.
- Create Crawl Maps to help understand website structure, discover internal link flow, and find orphan pages.
- Spot on-page issues such as duplicate or thin content and missing on-page elements.
- Generate user-friendly, color-coded reports, maps, and graphs, that make it easier to extract actionable insights from large data sets.
- Build custom white-label audit reports.
Pricing: Sitebulb has two subscription plans – Lite ($13.50/user/month) and Pro ($35/user/month).
Oncrawl
Oncrawl’s enterprise SEO crawler allows you to run technical site audits at scale. It lets you analyze over 300 million URLs per crawl and provides over 500 charts and 1,200 data points to monitor your website’s SEO performance.
Key web crawling features:
- Integrate data from various third-party sources like traffic from web analytics platforms and backlink profiles from Majestic with your crawl data to add more layers of insight.
- Integrate crawl data via native connectors with Google Analytics, Search Console, Majestic, AT Internet, and Adobe Analytics.
- Control how your website is crawled with powerful configuration settings that include lists of URLs, JS crawling, virtual robots.txt, DNS override, staging sites, subdomains, crawl speed, crawl scheduling, and more.
- Save all your crawls in one place with unlimited storage and analyze your website over time.
- Monitor hundreds of SEO factors, including content quality, duplication, architecture, indexability, performance, and HTML quality.
- Identify trends and prioritize SEO corrections based on dynamic segmentation (groups, subgroups, custom segments) and data points.
- Share results with read-only access, or invite other team members with full access to evaluate the crawl data.
Pricing: Oncrawl subscription plans start from $69/month. Large SEO agencies and enterprise websites can request a tailored plan. There is also a 14-day free trial available.
Botify
Botify’s enterprise-level SiteCrawler allows SEO teams to evaluate the structure and content of their large, complex sites just like a search engine, but without any crawl budget limitations. Better still, it’s fast! You can crawl up to 50 million URLs per crawl at a rate of 250 URLs per second and render your JavaScript at 100 URLs per second. In return, you get over 1,000 data points to analyze.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl all versions of your pages, like AMP, mobile, desktop, canonical versions, country versions, and more.
- Customize your crawls with parameters like virtual robots.txt, crawl rate limits, crawl start selection, and more.
- Evaluate your crawls by segment to understand search engine crawl behavior on specific sections of your site.
- Store crawls in the Botify platform to analyze your data over time.
- Import your log files to discover how search engines crawl your site.
- Integrate with your website analytics software to pull in traffic, bounce rate, conversions, and revenue.
Pricing: Botify has three different plans to meet your needs – Essential, Pro, and Enterprise. Request a demo to find the best option for you.
Netpeak Spider
Netpeak Spider is a desktop web crawler (Windows-only) that runs SEO audits, checks for issues, and provides in-depth SEO analysis of your website. It’s one of the fastest, most flexible, and in-depth crawlers for diagnosing your site’s SEO health, and it’s used by Shopify, TemplateMonster, and Thomson Reuters.
Key web crawling features:
- Identify 100+ potential site optimization issues, including broken links and images, duplicate content, titles, and meta description tags.
- Check 80+ key technical SEO parameters, including redirects, robots.txt, crawling and indexing instructions, relevant tags.
- Check status codes of site pages in bulk.
- Import data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and Yandex for deeper analysis.
- Segment your data when crawling huge websites.
- Use the built-in PageRank checker to spot internal link equity and issues.
- Generate and validate XML Sitemaps.
- Generate site audit reports in PDF with diagrams and graphics, plus your recommendations.
Pricing: Netpeak Spider has several subscription plans ranging from $26/month to $149/month, plus a freemium version.
JetOctopus
JetOctopus is one of the fastest and most efficient cloud-based SEO crawlers. It has no crawl limits, simultaneous crawl limits, or project limits, so you can scale accordingly, plus it’s straightforward to use.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl 50 million pages and more with unlimited capacity.
- Crawl up to 250 pages/second, plus JavaScript crawling.
- Visualize the scale of each issue in the problem-centric dashboard and implement the recommended changes one by one.
- Identify duplicated content, including partial duplicates.
- Export as much data as you need.
- Compare and contrast crawls to check progress.
- Segment data when crawling huge websites.
- Schedule regular crawls.
- Store and access data reports for 12 months.
Pricing: JetOctopus has a range of subscription plans based on the number of pages you need to crawl, starting at $30/month for 100K pages/month.
Website Auditor
Website Auditor is a suite of desktop-based tools, including on-page analysis, technical SEO guides, and graphic reporting. You can also run the Core Web Vitals assessment module to see how your site stacks up to Google’s Page Experience Update.
Key web crawling features:
- Crawl your entire site to find and audit every resource, both internal and external: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, images, videos, and more.
- Perform site crawl analysis following robots.txt instructions, just like the search engine bots do.
- Reveal every technical SEO issue on your site that can affect search engine indexation, rankings, and user experience.
- Analyze the health of any web page and any keyword based on your own on-page stats and those of your top-ranking competitors.
- Improve your pages’ topical relevance and authority and optimize for semantic search performance with the built-in TF-IDF tool.
- Visualize your site structure and uncover problems in the architecture, including internal links.
- Follow step-by-step advice and optimize pages inside the app.
- Impress clients with customized, white-label graphic reports.
- Share SEO audit results via a shareable link or an email attachment.
- Automate reporting by setting up scheduled tasks.
Pricing: Website Auditor comes in three editions – Free, Professional ($129/year), and Enterprise ($299/year). Many features are available in the Free version, but the premium versions allow you to analyze unlimited URLs plus generate and store reports.
Which SEO Crawler is Right For You?
We looked at the nine best SEO web crawlers, including several cloud-based apps, three desktop tools, and an all-in-one SEO platform.
But which one is right for you?
If you’re looking for a simple, easy-to-use starter app, then you can’t go far wrong with JetOctopus or Netpeak Spider.
If you’re looking for an enterprise-level crawler that can scale to millions of URLs, then you’ll want to check out Deepcrawl, Oncrawl, or Botify.
If you’re looking for a top web crawler that’s also part of the leading all-in-one platform for SEO, PPC, and competitor research, then Semrush (aff) is a great choice.
Let us know in the comments which SEO web crawler you’re using.
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