---
title: "Kitbase vs Screaming Frog: Crawling Your Site vs Watching Who Crawls It | Kitbase Blog"
description: "Kitbase vs Screaming Frog compared on site auditing, log file analysis, AI crawler detection and continuous versus on-demand measurement."
canonical: https://kitbase.dev/blog/kitbase-vs-screaming-frog
---

**Screaming Frog crawls your site to find what's broken. Kitbase watches which AI crawlers visit your site and whether the engines then cite you.** Opposite directions on the same wire.

We build Kitbase, and we use Screaming Frog.

## What Screaming Frog does

A desktop crawler that fetches your site the way a search engine would and reports what it finds: broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing metadata, canonical problems, orphan pages, response codes at scale. There's a separate Log File Analyser that imports server logs and shows which bots hit which URLs.

For technical SEO auditing it's the standard, and the licence costs less per year than most SaaS tools cost per month. The trade is that it's a desktop tool: you run it, it produces a snapshot, and you interpret the results. There's no continuous monitoring and no history unless you keep the exports.

## What Kitbase does

Kitbase never crawls your site to audit it in Screaming Frog's sense, though it does run a hosted site audit through KitbaseAuditBot covering issues, performance and duplicates.

Its distinctive work is the opposite direction. Server-side [AI crawler detection](https://docs.kitbase.dev/crawler-detection) reads requests forwarded from your server or edge, resolves each to a named crawler and vendor, and verifies the claim against that crawler's published identity before counting it. Per-path crawl frequency shows which sections GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and PerplexityBot are actually reading, continuously, without you running anything.

Above that sits the answer layer: up to ten surfaces, presence rate splitting brand mentions from domain citations, share of voice normalised across every tracked brand with a dense rank, cited pages classified as yours, a competitor's or third-party and tagged by source type, and per-mention sentiment, recommendation status and list position.

And below it, cookieless web analytics on the same pipeline with autocapture, funnels, journeys, retention, page durations and rage-click detection.

**The honest limitation:** Kitbase's site audit is nowhere near Screaming Frog's depth for technical crawling. If you need redirect chain analysis across 200,000 URLs, use Screaming Frog.

## Side by side

| | Screaming Frog | Kitbase |
|---|---|---|
| Crawls your own site for issues | Yes, deep | Hosted site audit, lighter |
| Log file analysis | Yes, separate desktop tool | Forwarded requests, continuous |
| AI crawler attribution by vendor | Manual, from logs | Yes, automatic |
| Crawler identity verification | Manual | Yes |
| Continuous monitoring | No, on-demand | Yes |
| Stored history | Your exports | Yes |
| Answer-engine visibility | No | Up to 10 surfaces |
| Web analytics | No | Yes, cookieless |
| Pricing | Annual desktop licence, low | From $99/mo |

## The manual path, honestly

You can get AI crawler data from Screaming Frog's Log File Analyser. Import your logs, filter by user agent, and you'll see GPTBot and the rest.

Three things make that harder to sustain than it looks.

**Verification.** The Log File Analyser shows what the user agent claimed. Confirming that a request calling itself GPTBot came from OpenAI's published infrastructure is separate work, and skipping it means counting scrapers as real crawler visits. On some sites that inflates AI crawl numbers substantially.

**Maintenance.** New AI crawlers appear regularly, vendors split crawling across multiple agents for different purposes, and IP ranges change. A filter list you built in March is out of date by June. Our [list of AI crawlers](/blog/list-of-ai-crawlers) gives a sense of how many there now are.

**Joining.** Crawl data becomes useful when set against citation data: this section stopped being fetched, and citations for those prompts fell six weeks later. Doing that by hand each month is where the effort actually goes.

If you have an analyst with spare hours, the manual path works and costs almost nothing. If you don't, that's the case for buying it. Our [guide to auditing AI crawlers in server logs](/blog/ai-crawler-audit-server-logs) covers the manual approach properly.

## FAQ

**Can Screaming Frog show me AI crawlers?**
Its Log File Analyser can, by filtering user agents in your server logs. Verification and vendor mapping are manual.

**Does Kitbase replace Screaming Frog?**
No. Its site audit is much lighter than Screaming Frog's technical crawling.

**Why does crawler verification matter?**
Spoofing a user-agent header is trivial, so unverified counts include scrapers impersonating real crawlers.

**Do I need both?**
Many teams use both: Screaming Frog for technical audits, a continuous tool for AI crawler and citation monitoring.

**Is Screaming Frog good value?**
Very. The annual licence costs less than most SaaS monthly fees, and for technical crawling nothing at that price compares.

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*Want continuous, verified AI crawler data without building it from logs? [Start your free trial](https://app.kitbase.dev/signup/) — 7 days, no credit card required.*