Everything You Want to Know about Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is desktop software SEO practitioners run themselves to crawl a site and audit on-page and technical SEO issues; it isn't a persistent bot operated by Screaming Frog, but a tool run by the site's own team or an SEO consultant.
Last verified August 15, 2026 against Screaming Frog's published crawler docs
Why it's crawling your site
A user, often the site owner or their SEO consultant, ran the SEO Spider tool against the site to audit it; it obeys robots.txt the same way Googlebot does, unless the user configures it to ignore robots.txt.
How Screaming Frog SEO Spider views your website
Screaming Frog SEO Spider renders JavaScript before reading your page, so client-side content, hydrated components, and JS-injected text are all visible to it, the same as a browser would see.
Paste a URL for the rendered-vs-crawled diff, blocked resources, and the sections that never reach the bot.
How to block Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Add the rule below to your site's robots.txt. Most crawlers, including Screaming Frog SEO Spider, check for changes within 24 hours.
User-agent: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Disallow: /Need the full walkthrough?
Partial blocks, per-directory rules, Cloudflare and server-level options, verification.