Headless MCP server for Screaming Frog SEO Spider – run crawls, export and analyze crawl data via the CLI. Small locked-down tool surface for scheduled audits, CI, and unattended AI agents.
README
A headless MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It drives the SF command line and saved crawl database directly, so Claude (or any MCP-compatible client) can run crawls, export crawl data, and analyze the results with the Screaming Frog GUI closed: on your laptop, on a server, or inside scheduled audits and CI pipelines.
This is a community project, not affiliated with Screaming Frog. Since SEO Spider v24 there is also an official MCP built into the app. The two work differently and solve different problems.
Screaming Frog shipped an official MCP server in SEO Spider v24. It's substantial: around 29 tools covering crawl control (start, pause, resume, progress), reports and bulk exports with field selection, URL-level inspection, screenshots, embeddings exports, and optionally a Node.js script runner with npm and filesystem read/write tools. It runs in two modes, either a Streamable HTTP server inside the open app, or a STDIO mode where the MCP client launches the Spider itself, headless. Setup is documented for Claude Desktop and LM Studio.
If you want maximum capability in an interactive session (visualizations, crawl comparison, screenshots, scripted post-processing of exports), use the official MCP. It does far more, and it's maintained by the vendor.
This server makes a different trade: it's a small, deliberately limited wrapper around SF's CLI and the saved crawl database, built for runs where nobody is watching.
Locked-down by design. Nine read-and-export tools, nothing else. No script runner, no npm install, no filesystem write access. The official MCP offers all three, and its own docs note that enabling the Node runtime "allows