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At what size does a website outgrow a free SEO audit tool?

Published September 28, 2026 · Editor: Kaz (pen name)

Summary

A free crawler handles a site that fits within 500 URLs per crawl, and Ahrefs Free audits sites you have verified as yours with 5,000 crawl credits per project each month. Past that, you are paying for two separate limits: how much you can crawl in a month and how many pages a single project can hold. A site can fit comfortably under the first and still run into the second.

A 30,000-page site on four plans

Say you want to crawl a 30,000-page site twice a month, which is 60,000 pages. Ahrefs Lite ($129 a month) has 100,000 crawl credits, so the monthly total is fine, but a Lite project tops out at 25,000 pages, so the whole site will not fit in one project. Ahrefs Standard ($249) raises that to 50,000 pages per project with 500,000 monthly credits. SE Ranking Core ($129, or $103.20 a month billed annually) covers the job with 250,000 audit pages per month across the account and up to 250,000 pages per project. Its Growth plan ($279, or $223.20 billed annually) goes to 2 million pages a month and 1 million per project, and Ahrefs Advanced ($449) to 1.5 million credits and 250,000 pages per project.

Which limit bites first depends on the shape of your work. One large site hits the per-project cap. An agency with dozens of small sites burns through the monthly allowance.

Screaming Frog: one license per person, per year

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler, and the free version needs no email or sign-up. It stops at 500 URLs per crawl, cannot save crawls, and keeps the configuration and advanced features locked. A license costs $279 a year and covers one user, so two people need two. Bulk pricing starts at five:

1 to 4 licenses: $279 each per year
5 to 9: $265
10 to 19: $249
20 or more: $235

The license removes the 500-URL cap and unlocks saving and reopening crawls, the configuration options, custom source code search, custom extraction, Google Analytics and Search Console integration, and JavaScript rendering. There is no limit on how many sites you crawl. "Unlimited" still has a ceiling in practice, since Screaming Frog says the number of URLs you can crawl depends on the memory and storage you allocate. If the license lapses, you drop back to 500 URLs and can no longer open crawls you saved, which matters if you compare this year's audit against last year's.

Ahrefs Free for sites you own

Ahrefs Free, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, lets you verify as many sites as you like. Site Audit gets 5,000 crawl credits per project per month, and credits are spent only on HTML pages that return a 200 status. Broken URLs, redirects and non-HTML files are not counted. A 1,000-page site crawled weekly uses about 4,300 credits a month and fits. At 2,000 pages, weekly crawls no longer fit, but crawling every other week does. Competitor sites you cannot verify are outside the free plan.

Semrush does not publish its audit limits

Semrush's pricing page lists Site Audit on the SEO plan and an "AI-ready" Site Audit from Starter up, but gives no page counts for any plan below Enterprise, which is described only as "multi-million-page crawling." For a crawl-size comparison, Semrush's lower tiers cannot be placed on the table above from its own pricing page.

Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.

Sources

Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.