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Screaming Frog SEO Spider

UK / wider Europe Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 1 of 4 dimensions proven

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Screaming Frog Ltd · www.screamingfrog.co.uk

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Skeptic

Weighted verdict

Knows every vendor claims the largest index and the most accurate rankings, and that no buyer can check either. Reads instead for what can be held to: refresh frequency, stated limits, credit costs per endpoint, and what the invoice does when the team adds a seat.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Skeptic

Crawling & technical audit

How this is scored

Site crawling at real scale: what the crawler finds, how deeply it checks, whether Core Web Vitals and indexation problems are diagnosed rather than merely listed.

0 — No site crawler; the product is keyword data only.

3 — A crawler with a low page cap that reports broken links and missing tags, with no prioritisation and no rendering of JavaScript.

5 — Scheduled crawls at a stated page limit, JavaScript rendering, issue categories with severity, and Core Web Vitals pulled per template.

8 — Log-file or Search Console integration to compare what the crawler sees against what Google fetched, indexation and canonical diagnosis, structured-data validation, and issues prioritised by traffic impact rather than count.

10 — The audit is diagnostic rather than a list: crawl budget analysed, rendering differences surfaced, regressions detected between crawls with the deploy that caused them inferrable, and remediation guidance specific enough for a developer ticket.

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The Skeptic

This is the product's real substance: Chromium rendering, crawl comparison against staging via URL mapping, structured-data validation against Schema.org, issues typed with an estimated priority based on potential impact, and Search Console and PageSpeed data pulled into the crawl. It holds at 8, not higher, because nothing in the evidence documents log-file or crawl-budget analysis, and the URL limit is 'unlimited, dependent on allocated memory and storage' — stated, which I respect, but not an analysed budget. 1 1 2

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Keyword research & content guidance

How this is scored

Keyword discovery, intent classification, SERP feature analysis and on-page guidance — judged on the depth of the German-language data as much as the English.

0 — A keyword list with volumes from one source and no intent or difficulty signal.

3 — Volume and difficulty for major markets, with thin or stale German data and no SERP feature detail.

5 — Keyword research with volume, difficulty and intent across German and other EU markets, SERP feature presence, and basic on-page recommendations.

8 — Topic clustering, competitor gap analysis, SERP composition tracked over time, content briefs with entity coverage, and cannibalisation detection.

10 — Research and guidance close the loop: opportunity sized against realistic traffic, content scored against what currently ranks rather than against a keyword density heuristic, and recommendations that reference the specific pages in the customer's own site.

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The Skeptic

No keyword volumes, difficulty, intent or SERP-feature data exist anywhere in the evidence — there is no keyword database in this product at all, which sits below even the anchor-0 baseline of a list with volumes from one source. The only content-adjacent features evidenced are meta title/description length checks, duplicate detection and a spellcheck in 25+ languages. 1 2

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Rank tracking & index quality

How this is scored

The proprietary data: ranking accuracy and frequency, backlink index size and freshness. Scored on what the vendor documents about their own data, because nothing here can be verified from outside.

0 — Rankings and backlinks with no stated update frequency, no country or device granularity, and no documentation of how either is collected.

3 — Weekly rankings for one country and device, a backlink index with no stated refresh cadence or size.

5 — Daily rankings with country, language and device selection, local results, and a backlink index with a documented crawl frequency.

8 — Rankings at stated frequency across many locations including city-level, SERP feature attribution, backlink index size and refresh published, lost-and-found link detection, and historical data retained for the life of the account.

10 — The vendor is accountable for their own data: methodology documented, index size and freshness published and updated, historical rankings retained and exportable in full, and discrepancies against Search Console explained rather than hidden.

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The Skeptic

No rank tracking of any kind is evidenced, and the vendor owns no index: the only link metrics are explicitly pulled from Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz APIs. Honest not to claim 'the largest index' like the rest of the market — but it means there is no proprietary data, no methodology and no refresh cadence to hold anyone to, which is rubric level 0 territory. 1 1

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Reporting, integrations & API

How this is scored

Getting the data out and in front of someone: dashboards, white-label reporting for agencies, Search Console and analytics integration, and an API a team can build on.

0 — On-screen views only; export is a manual CSV and there is no API.

3 — Scheduled PDF reports and CSV export, one analytics integration, no API worth building against.

5 — Customisable dashboards, scheduled reports, Search Console and analytics integration, and a documented API with stated limits.

8 — White-label reporting with client access, data-warehouse or BigQuery export, multi-site and multi-client management, and an API with credit costs published per endpoint.

10 — The tool is a data source rather than a destination: full historical export in open formats, a versioned API with a deprecation policy, integrations the vendor maintains, and reporting an agency can hand a client unedited.

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The Skeptic

Data does get out — bulk exports, scheduled auto-export to any location including Google Sheets, and Looker Studio crawl reports — but every 'API integration' listed is the Spider consuming Google's and the link vendors' APIs, not exposing one of its own, and command-line automation is not a documented API with stated limits. No white-label, no warehouse export, no per-endpoint credit costs — because there is no API to charge for. 1 2

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Data portability & exit

How this is scored

Whether the ranking and crawl history — the only thing a multi-year subscription actually accumulates — remains the customer's when they leave.

0 — No bulk export; history is visible in the interface and nowhere else, and ends with the subscription.

3 — CSV export of current views only, with historical data capped or unavailable in bulk.

5 — Bulk export of rankings, keywords and crawl results including history, via interface or API.

8 — Complete historical export in open formats without credit metering that prices it out of reach, plus a documented retention period after cancellation.

10 — Exit is designed for: the full account exportable including every historical data point, API access sufficient to mirror the data continuously, and a stated grace period during which the archive remains retrievable.

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The Skeptic

The desktop deployment does what rubric level 8-10 ask in spirit: crawls are saved and reopened as local files, everything bulk-exports, and scheduled exports land wherever the user points them — the vendor physically cannot hold the history hostage, and there is no credit metering to price an exit out of reach. Held below 9 because saving crawls is a licensed feature and the evidence never states whether saved crawls remain openable once a licence lapses, nor what format the native files take. 1 2 1

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the account and crawl data live and who the contracting entity is. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; weighted lower here than in categories holding personal data, because an SEO tool mostly holds the customer's own strategy rather than their customers' identities.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated, subprocessors unnamed, and site or user data of unclear scope leaving the EU.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published, and any analytics or Search Console data handling described with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, certification published, and a DPA that covers the crawl and analytics data the tool ingests.

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The Skeptic

The contracting entity is UK, not EU, and the privacy policy itself confirms storage in UK and US data centres with transfers outside the EEA; subprocessors are unnamed beyond a promise that DPAs have been 'requested' from service providers. The one genuinely sovereign property is the deployment model — crawl data stays on the user's machine and leaves only when the user initiates it — which lifts this just above the floor. 3

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

The category where the headline price is least often the invoice. Whether a buyer can compute the real annual cost including keyword limits, crawl credits, API units, extra users and client seats — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A monthly headline exists, but keyword limits, crawl credits or the cost of an additional user are unstated — the invoice is unknowable.

5 — Tier prices public with the main limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (extra seats, API credits, historical data) is unpriced or metered opaquely.

8 — Every tier priced publicly with keyword, crawl and API limits, overage rates, per-seat costs, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: annual invoice derivable for a given keyword count, crawl volume, API usage and team size, with overage and every credit cost published.

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The Skeptic

This is the invoice a buyer can actually compute: £199 per user per year with published volume tiers down to £169, per-user licensing explicit, one-year term stated, and no keyword limits, crawl credits or API units because nothing is metered. Short of the top only because VAT treatment is never stated (they collect your VAT number at purchase) and the GBP 199 / USD 279 duality comes with no published rule for which one you pay. 2 1 3

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European sovereignty — proven facts

1 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors US CLOUD Act reach ⚠ unverified 0/2 pts 3 Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (12)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Product page www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 16 Sep 2026 +2 earlier captures: 15 Sep 2026, 11 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 16 Sep 2026 +1 earlier capture: 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Privacy policy www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 16 Sep 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Terms of service www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Crawling & technical audit — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Keyword research & content guidance — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Rank tracking & index quality — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Reporting, integrations & API — found from sitemap www.screamingfrog.co.uk Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →