The free Screaming Frog alternative that runs in your browser

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a brilliant tool — it's the reason "crawl your site like Googlebot" became standard practice. But it's a desktop app you install, it costs £199 a year once you pass 500 URLs, and it has a genuine learning curve. If all you want is to point a crawler at a site and see what's broken, that's a lot of friction for a Tuesday-afternoon audit.

Crawlinx was built for exactly that moment. It runs the same class of technical-SEO checks — the ones that actually decide whether Google can crawl, render and index your pages — straight from the browser, for free, without an account. You don't download anything. You don't manage a license. You don't burn your free-URL allowance and hit a wall halfway through a site.

Crawlinx vs Screaming Frog vs the rest

Here's the honest lay of the land. Every tool here is good at something; this table is about which one fits a fast, free audit.

Why crawl in the browser instead of a desktop app

A desktop crawler ties the audit to one machine. You install it, you keep it updated, you feed it a license, and the crawl uses your home or office IP and your laptop's memory. That's fine when you audit sites all day. It's overkill when a client emails you a URL and asks "is my SEO okay?" and you want an answer before you finish your coffee.

Because Crawlinx runs server-side, there's nothing on your machine to break. You can run it from a Chromebook, a phone, or a locked-down corporate laptop that won't let you install anything. And every report has its own link, so you can send the result to a client or a developer without exporting spreadsheets.

156 checks — the ones that move indexing

Depth isn't about counting features; it's about catching the things that quietly keep pages out of Google. Crawlinx checks titles and meta descriptions, canonical tags and canonical loops, hreflang, robots and X-Robots directives, noindex reaching the wrong pages, broken internal and external links, redirect chains, mobile-vs-desktop parity, Core Web Vitals signals, structured-data validity, near-duplicate content clusters, orphan pages and crawl depth — and it diffs the raw HTML against the JavaScript-rendered DOM so you see what Googlebot actually gets. Findings are ranked by severity with the exact URLs, so you fix what matters first.

Where Screaming Frog still wins — and we'll say so

We're not going to pretend Crawlinx replaces the SEO Spider for everyone. If you crawl sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs, need custom extraction with XPath or regex, want deep configuration of every crawl parameter, or hook into Google Analytics and Search Console APIs inside the crawl, Screaming Frog (or Sitebulb for visual reporting) is the better tool and worth the licence. Crawlinx is the right call when you want a fast, free, no-install audit of a normal-sized site — which, honestly, is most audits.

How it compares to the cloud suites and Search Console

Ahrefs and Semrush have excellent site-audit modules, but they live inside subscriptions that start around $99–$139 a month and are really sold for their backlink and keyword data. If you just need the technical crawl, you're paying for a lot you won't use. Sitebulb is a lovely desktop tool with the best visual reports in the category, but it's still an install and a subscription. Google Search Console is free and essential — but it only shows data for sites you've verified, it reports what Google already crawled rather than crawling on demand, and it won't audit a competitor or a client's site before you have access. Crawlinx fills the gap: an on-demand, no-account technical crawl of any public site, free.

Built for AI agents, too

This is the part no desktop spider can match. Crawlinx exposes a hosted MCP server, so an AI assistant like Claude can run an audit and read the results as structured JSON or clean Markdown — no scraping, no screenshots. Add it once:

claude mcp add --transport http crawlinx https://crawlinx.com/mcp

Then your agent can scan a URL, pull the prioritized fix list, and act on it. If you're building SEO into an automated workflow, that's a first-class integration instead of a hack.

Frequently asked questions