From URL to Full Site Audit in Minutes

ScreamingCAT is a desktop application that crawls your website like a search engine would — following links, analyzing pages, and flagging issues. Here’s how it works.

Configure Your Crawl

Paste your starting URL and adjust settings to match your needs:

Crawl depth — how many link levels deep to go
Speed controls — number of threads and max requests per second
User-Agent — crawl as Googlebot, Bingbot, a real browser, or a custom agent
URL filters — include or exclude URL patterns using regex
Rendering mode — text-only (fast) or JavaScript rendering (headless Chrome)
Robots.txt — respect, ignore, or report-only mode
Authentication — log into password-protected areas before crawling

You can also upload a URL list instead of crawling from a starting page.

Crawl and Extract

Once you start the crawl, the multi-threaded Rust engine begins visiting pages concurrently. For each URL, it extracts:

HTTP response code and response time
Page title, meta description, H1, H2 tags
Canonical URL and meta robots directives
Word count, text ratio, and page size
Internal and external link counts
Images and missing alt text

Structured data (JSON-LD) with validation
Open Graph and Twitter Card tags
Hreflang tags for international SEO
Security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options)
CSS, JavaScript, and inline resource counts

If JavaScript rendering is enabled, ScreamingCAT uses headless Chrome to fully render each page before extracting data — so you see what search engines see.

Detect Issues Automatically

ScreamingCAT applies over 60 automated checks to every crawled page and categorizes issues by type and severity:

Critical — broken pages (4xx, 5xx), server errors, no response

Warning — missing titles, duplicate meta descriptions, redirect chains

Notice — generic anchor text, excessive DOM depth, low text ratio

Enrich with Google Data (Optional)

Optionally connect your Google accounts to layer real performance data onto crawl results:

PageSpeed Insights — Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals (LCP, FCP, CLS) for each URL
Google Search Console — clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position
Google Analytics 4 — sessions, users, bounce rate, and conversions

This lets you prioritize fixes based on actual traffic impact, not just technical severity.

Analyze and Visualize

Results Table

A fast, virtualized table displaying all crawled URLs with every data point. Sort, filter, and search across columns.

Issues Panel

See all detected issues in one view. Filter by severity or category. Each issue links to the affected URLs.

Site Visualizations

Crawl Tree, Site Graph, and Crawl Depth Chart — see your site structure at a glance.

Export and Compare

Export your data as CSV, Excel (XLSX), or XML sitemap. Save crawl snapshots and compare any two to detect added URLs, removed URLs, and changed metadata. Save your entire crawl as a .sccat project file to reopen later.

How it works