FreeSEOCrawlerTool:OurScreamingFrogAlternative

TL;DR: We built a free, open-source SEO crawler tool that does 85-90% of what Screaming Frog does - in an evening. No £200 annual license. No desktop app bloat. Just pure command-line power for developers who want speed and ease. "

Let me tell you about a conversation that happens at agencies everywhere, probably including yours:

Client: "Can you audit our site's SEO?"

Us: "Absolutely! Let me just fire up our SEO crawler tool..."

Finance: "That's £200/year per seat for Screaming Frog."

Us: "...or I could manually check a few pages?"

For years, we've been making these compromises. Not because we're lazy. Not because we don't care about technical SEO audits. But because building a comprehensive website crawler from scratch was the kind of project that would sit in the "someday" folder forever, gathering dust next to "rewrite the company website" and "organise that team building event we keep talking about."

Then AI Changed the Game

Here's the thing about 2025 right now; that still feels slightly surreal: the tools have finally caught up to our ambitions.

I'm not talking about AI writing your content or generating blog posts that sound like they were written by an enthusiastic but slightly confused intern. I'm talking about AI as a force multiplier for developers. Tools like Cursor and Claude that turn "I wish we had a tool that..." into "I built a tool that..." in hours instead of weeks.

So we asked ourselves: what if we just... built our own free SEO crawler?

Not an AI-powered "smart" analyser that tries to guess what Google wants. Not a chatbot that explains SEO to you. A raw, comprehensive, technical SEO auditing tool that does the unglamorous work of crawling every page, extracting every meta tag, checking every heading hierarchy, and flagging every issue - the kind of open-source SEO tool that would have taken a dedicated developer weeks to build in the before-times.

Meet SEO Reporter: The Free Screaming Frog Alternative We Built in a Weekend

SEO Reporter is what happens when you stop asking "can we afford Screaming Frog?" and start asking "what would we build if we had unlimited time?"

It's a TypeScript CLI tool that crawls websites, performs 220+ technical SEO checks, and generates beautiful HTML reports and CSV exports. Think Screaming Frog's core functionality as a command-line SEO tool, minus the desktop app, minus the annual license, plus the warm fuzzy feeling of owning your own tools.

What This SEO Analysis Tool Actually Does

The unglamorous truth about SEO auditing is that most of it is just... checking things. Lots of things. Systematically. The kind of work humans are terrible at and computers excel at:

• Meta tag analysis
• : Titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots directives - with pixel-width calculations because character counts lie

• Content quality checks
• : Duplicate detection (exact and near-duplicate using MinHash), thin content, readability scores, even lorem ipsum detection (you'd be surprised)

• Technical SEO
• : Heading hierarchy, image alt text, internal linking structure, orphan pages, redirect chains

• Security analysis
• : HTTPS implementation, mixed content, security headers, insecure forms

• URL quality
• : Because someone on your team definitely used spaces in a URL at some point

• Performance metrics
• : Response times, HTML size, content-to-code ratios

The Developer-First Approach to Website Crawling

Here's where it gets interesting. We didn't build this as a SaaS product or a desktop app. We built it as a command-line SEO crawler because:

1. Developers live in terminals
2. - Why context-switch to a GUI when you can pipe results directly into your workflow?

1. Automation is trivial
2. - Run it in CI/CD, schedule it as a cron job, integrate it into deployment pipelines

1. Data export is built-in
2. - CSV exports for every data type, ready for Excel, Google Sheets, or your data warehouse

1. No installation headaches
2. - It's an npm package.
3. npx seo-reporter --url https://yoursite.com
4. and you're off

Why This Free SEO Tool Matters More Than You Think

The real story here isn't "we built a Screaming Frog alternative" - plenty of teams build internal tools. The real story is what becomes possible when the barrier to building drops from "weeks of dev time" to "a weekend project".

The Old Way: Tool Poverty

Before AI-assisted development became genuinely useful, agencies operated under what I call "tool poverty." You had two choices:

1. Buy commercial SEO analysis tools
2. - Expensive, often overkill, sometimes vendor lock-in

1. Make do without
2. - Manual processes, spot checks, hoping nothing breaks

The middle ground - building custom website crawlers perfectly suited to your workflow - was too expensive. A custom SEO crawler might take 40-80 hours of developer time. At agency rates, that's £4,000-8,000 of billable hours. Suddenly that £200/year Screaming Frog license looks very reasonable.

The New Way: Tool Abundance

With AI pair programming, the economics flip. Our free SEO crawler represents perhaps 8-10 hours of actual development time, most of it spent on design decisions rather than implementation details. The AI handles:

• Boilerplate TypeScript setup

• HTML parsing logic

• Concurrency management

• CSV export formatting

• Report template structure

We handle:

• What technical SEO checks to perform