Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Operator

Screaming Frog Ltd

Type

Crawler

Official page

screamingfrog.co.uk

robots.txt token

Spider

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under SEO tools

What it does

Description unavailable from knownagents.com

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Data Scrapers

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Screaming Frog SEO Spider carry a user agent like this:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider/2.22

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Spider
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Vireo keeps requests from Screaming Frog SEO Spider out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under SEO tools, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Screaming Frog SEO Spider's user agents.

Sources

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider information page (screamingfrog.co.uk)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)