Screaming Frog
A desktop crawler survived the AI wave by being unglamorous and correct.
why this verdict
Keep paying — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the SEO job, so this one still earns its $22/mo.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Chat models can explain crawl issues but cannot crawl your site. OpenAI, May 13, 2024 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 1 of 2 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Google Search Console.
- What the call is worth $264/yr
- $22/mo at the entry paid tier — $264 a year per seat.
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- May 13, 2024
- List price
- $22/mo
- Per year
- $264
The backstory
Screaming Frog is a desktop spider that crawls your site and dumps every redirect chain, broken canonical and orphaned page into a table. AI did not touch it, because the value is in the crawling, not the explaining. If anything the models made it more useful: paste the export into a chat window and get the remediation plan. A one-time-ish licence for a tool that does one hard thing properly is exactly the shape that survives.
Escape hatches
Prettier crawl visualisations, similar model.
sitebulb.com open_in_newFree coverage reports, less depth.
search.google.com open_in_new1 of 2 replacements have a usable free tier.