What Screaming Frog does
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is desktop software that runs locally on a user's machine (Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu) and crawls websites to find SEO issues, extracting on-page elements, checking response codes, and generating reports. By default it identifies with its own Screaming Frog SEO Spider user agent, but operators can switch to preset user agents such as Googlebot or browsers, or set a fully custom string. It respects robots.txt by default, though the configuration includes options to ignore robots.txt entirely or to download and report it while ignoring its directives.
How to identify Screaming Frog
Temso identifies Screaming Frogtraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
Screaming Frog SEO SpiderScreaming Frog FAQ
What is Screaming Frog?
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler used for technical SEO audits. It runs locally on the operator's own machine rather than from a central service, extracting on-page elements, checking response codes, and identifying technical problems.
Can I block Screaming Frog with robots.txt?
Only partially. The SEO Spider respects robots.txt by default, so a Disallow rule will stop crawls that use the default settings, but each operator runs their own copy and can configure it to ignore robots.txt or to identify as a different user agent such as Googlebot or a browser. A reliable block therefore requires server-level controls rather than robots.txt alone.
About SEO & Analytics Crawlers
Crawlers behind SEO and marketing-intelligence platforms: backlink databases, site audits, rank tracking, and brand monitoring.
Blocking these has no effect on search or AI visibility. It mainly limits what third-party tools (including your competitors' tools) can see about your site.
