Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Desktop website crawler for technical SEO audits, free for up to 500 URLs.

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The SEO Spider crawls a website to find broken links, audit metadata and hreflang, generate XML sitemaps and visualise site structure. The paid licence removes the crawl limit and adds integrations, including crawling with OpenAI and Gemini.

Best for

Technical SEO audits of sites of any size, run by someone comfortable with a desktop tool.

Not for

People wanting keyword or backlink research, because it is a crawler and not a research database.

How to get your money’s worth

01Crawl a small site with the free version first; it handles up to 500 URLs.
02Connect Search Console and Analytics in the paid version so each crawled URL carries traffic data.
03Teams of five or more get a lower per-licence price, so buy licences together.

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Ahrefs

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SEO data platform for backlinks, keywords, rank tracking and site audits, with LLM visibility tracking.

Best for: Teams that need backlink and keyword research on competitors as well as their own site, in one subscription.
Price: £23/month (Starter); Lite is £99/month; Free plan

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AthenaHQ

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Tracks brand visibility across 11 AI models and recommends what to change.

Best for: Brands that want coverage of a wide set of AI models and can connect GA4 or Shopify data.
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Clearscope

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Content optimisation and AI search visibility tracking for editorial teams.

Best for: In-house content teams that want a simple grading workflow for writers and are happy to pay for it.
Price: $129/month (Essentials)

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