Digispot AI SEO Spider vs Screaming Frog

One product, two halves. The Spider is the desktop app — credit-free local crawling, real-browser audits, the site visualizer, the knowledge graph and the MCP server, running on your own computer. The cloud platform is what you reach from any browser — keyword research, Content Studio, Image Studio, rank tracking, and the dashboards your team and clients see. One Digispot AI account activates both; there is no separate licence.

No. Crawls, reports and screenshots stay local by default. The only data that leaves is what you explicitly send — for example, asking an AI provider to analyse a result, or syncing Search Console and GA4 through Google's OAuth. Competitors are profiled from their published sitemaps and robots files; their pages are never crawled.

300+ SEO and AEO checks. Site-level: robots.txt, XML sitemap and site architecture, HTTPS, llms.txt and AI-crawler visibility, indexability and canonicals. Page-level: titles and meta, heading structure, content depth and keywords, schema (JSON-LD), Open Graph and Twitter/X cards, internal and external links, image and video SEO. Plus Core Web Vitals from a real browser (LCP, INP, CLS, TTFB), local SEO (LocalBusiness schema, NAP) and hreflang. Every finding is backed by a captured screenshot.

The Spider ships an MCP server with 59 project-scoped tools, so Claude, Cursor or any MCP-capable agent can run a real audit against your local crawl data — query issues and page reports, compare crawls, surface quick wins, start or pause crawls, and draft fixes. Agents get read and safe-write access only; they can never delete projects or data, and that boundary is enforced by the server, not by a prompt. Free, open-source Claude Code skills (/seo-audit, /seo-quick-wins, /seo-striking-distance and more) are on GitHub.

Yes. Each client gets its own project with isolated crawls, history and Google connections. Build the pipeline once — crawl, audit, keywords, backlinks, AI insights — save it, and run it across every client site on demand or per deploy. Your agent can trigger the whole pipeline over MCP.

The Spider activates with your Digispot AI account on every plan: one device on Free and Starter, two on Pro, up to four on Agency. macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows (64-bit and ARM) are both available; the Windows installer is code-signed, so it installs without SmartScreen warnings. Paid plans start with a 7-day trial and no card.

Yes — it does the full classic desktop crawl (technical SEO, redirects, broken links, export-grade data) and then keeps going where those tools stop: it renders every page in a real browser across mobile, tablet and desktop, weights each issue by the Search Console traffic it actually risks, simulates AI answer-engine crawlers, and hands the fixes to your AI agent over MCP. Starter costs less than a Screaming Frog licence. See the full side-by-side at /compare/screaming-frog.

The one that answers three questions a plain crawler can't: which issue costs you the most traffic (needs your Search Console data), whether AI answer engines can read your pages (needs AI-crawler simulation), and what to do next (needs ranked, paste-ready fixes). Digispot AI SEO Spider is a native app for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows that does all three, crawls locally without credits, and starts free for sites up to 100 pages.

Run the Spider's AI-crawler simulation. It requests your pages as GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot alongside Googlebot, reports whether each can reach the main content, checks your robots.txt for rules that quietly block them, validates and scores your llms.txt, and flags answer-structure gaps — FAQ schema, thin answers, missing entity signals — that keep you out of AI answers even when Google ranks you.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard AI agents use to call tools. The Spider runs a local MCP server that exposes your crawl, audit, Search Console, keyword, backlink and competitor data as 59 tools, so an agent can ask real questions of your real site instead of guessing. It works with Claude (Claude Code and Claude Desktop), Cursor, and any MCP-capable client; no data leaves your machine unless the agent you chose sends it.

Both, in the same graph. Keywords: import your terms or research new ones with search volume and intent, then map every keyword to the page that should own it — covered, needs improvement, or missing — so gaps become a content plan. Backlinks: a domain-scoped profile of referring domains, ranks and nofollow splits, cached locally and set against your competitors' counts. Because crawl, keywords and backlinks share one knowledge graph, the fix list already knows which keyword and which link gap each page is fighting for.

Every crawl becomes one connected map of your site: pages, topics, entity hubs, verified business facts, keywords, search queries and rivals. It surfaces topics with no verified facts behind them (where a model would guess), shows which pages form a cluster and which are orphaned, and is served to your AI agent over MCP as one compact brief — so content, fixes and internal links are grounded in your site's real structure instead of inferred page by page. It is built from crawl data you already have and uses no AI credits.