Digispot AI SEO Spider vs Screaming Frog

One product, two halves. The Spider is the desktop app: free local crawling, real-browser audits, the site visualizer, the knowledge graph, keywords, rank tracking, AI visibility, competitors and the MCP server. The cloud platform runs in any browser: keyword research, Content Studio, rank tracking, AI Mentions and team dashboards. One Digispot AI account activates both. No separate licence.

No. Crawls, reports and screenshots stay on your machine, and nothing syncs to a cloud. Data leaves only when you send it: an AI request, a keyword or backlink lookup, or a Search Console and GA4 sync via Google OAuth. Competitors are profiled from their sitemaps and robots files; their pages are never crawled.

330 SEO and AEO checks in 23 categories, 200+ of them on every page. Site-level: robots.txt, XML sitemaps, site architecture, HTTPS, llms.txt, AI-crawler access, indexability and canonicals. Page-level: titles, meta, headings, content, schema (JSON-LD), Open Graph and X cards, links, images and video. Plus real-browser Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS, TTFB), local SEO (LocalBusiness, NAP) and hreflang. Every page is screenshotted as rendered.

The Spider ships a local MCP server with 86 project-scoped tools and 9 expert slash commands. Claude, Cursor or any MCP agent can query issues and page reports, compare crawls, find quick wins, start or pause crawls, and draft fixes. Agents can never delete projects or data; the server enforces that, not a prompt. The slash commands (/seo-audit, /seo-quick-wins and more) ship inside the app, nothing to install.

Yes. Each client gets its own project with separate crawls, history and Google accounts. Build a workflow once (crawl, audit, keywords, backlinks, AI insights) and run it for any client on demand. Your agent can trigger it over MCP.

Your Digispot AI account activates the Spider on every plan: one device on Free and Starter, two on Pro, four on Agency. It runs on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows (x64 and ARM). The Windows installer is code-signed, so SmartScreen doesn't warn. You can also try Starter free for 7 days, once, with no card.

Yes. It does the classic desktop crawl: technical SEO, redirects, broken links. Then it goes further. It renders every page in a real browser on mobile, tablet and desktop. It ranks each issue by Search Console traffic at risk. It simulates AI answer-engine crawlers. And it hands fixes to your AI agent over MCP. Starter costs less than a Screaming Frog licence. Full side-by-side: /compare/screaming-frog.

The one that answers three questions a plain crawler can't. Which issue costs the most traffic? That needs Search Console data. Can AI answer engines read your pages? That needs AI-crawler simulation. What should you fix next? That needs ranked, paste-ready fixes. Digispot AI SEO Spider does all three, natively on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows. Crawling is local and free, and the Free plan covers 100 pages.

Run the Spider's AI-crawler simulation. It requests your pages as GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot, beside Googlebot, and reports whether each reaches your main content. It checks robots.txt for rules that 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 with 86 tools over your crawl, audit, Search Console, keyword, ranking, AI visibility, backlink and competitor data, plus 9 expert slash commands. It works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and any MCP client. No data leaves your machine unless your chosen agent sends it.

Both, in one graph. Keywords: check demand free with Keyword Pulse, import your list or a Keyword Planner file free, or research new terms with volume and intent on paid plans. Each keyword maps to the page that should own it: covered, needs work, or missing. Backlinks (paid plans): referring domains, ranks and nofollow splits, cached locally and set against your competitors. Because all three share one knowledge graph, every fix knows its keyword and link gap.

Every crawl becomes one connected map: pages, topics, entity hubs, verified business facts, keywords, search queries and rivals. It shows topics with no verified facts (where a model would guess), which pages form clusters, and which are orphaned. Your AI agent reads it over MCP as one compact brief, so content, fixes and links follow your site's real structure. It is built from your crawl data and is free on every plan.

Yes, on paid plans. Rank tracking checks your keywords' Google positions by market and device, weekly if you choose, and keeps the history: 25 keywords on Starter, 100 on Pro and Agency. It shows which page ranks for each keyword and keeps branded and non-branded rankings apart. AI visibility shows how often Google AI Overview and ChatGPT answers mention your site versus the competitors you track. Results are stored on your machine; each check uses data credits.

Add a rival by domain, or let the Spider find your competitors in your own city from your business locations. It profiles each one from its sitemap and robots files, never crawling their pages, then sets their sections, topics, referring domains, AI mentions and llms.txt against yours. Signals it could not measure are shown as unknown, never as a misleading zero. Free lists one rival; paid plans analyse up to four.