Oncrawl – Technical SEO Crawler & Log File Analysis Platform

Overview

Oncrawl is a technical SEO platform that provides tools for auditing website architecture, analyzing server log files, and correlating SEO performance data. Established in 2013, the platform is designed to assist technical SEO specialists, developers, and marketing teams in understanding how search engines crawl and index their websites. Its core functionality revolves around simulating search engine bot behavior to identify potential issues that could impact organic visibility.

The platform’s crawling capabilities are engineered to handle large-scale websites, allowing users to configure detailed crawl settings, including crawl speed, user-agent simulation, and exclusion rules. This enables granular analysis of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS resources, providing insights into page structure, internal linking, and content duplication. The objective is to uncover technical barriers to search engine optimization, such as broken links, redirect chains, canonicalization issues, and unindexed pages.

Beyond traditional crawling, Oncrawl integrates log file analysis, which processes server access logs to show actual search engine bot activity. This allows users to observe how frequently specific pages are visited by bots like Googlebot, identify crawl budget waste, and understand indexation patterns. By combining crawl data with log data, Oncrawl provides a comprehensive view of a website's technical health and how it's perceived by search engines, a methodology that can offer more direct insights into search engine behavior than some client-side crawling tools alone.

Oncrawl is positioned for organizations managing extensive websites, e-commerce platforms, or complex content management systems where technical SEO plays a critical role in organic search performance. It is particularly beneficial for identifying opportunities to improve crawl efficiency and ensuring that critical content is discoverable and indexable. The platform also offers features for correlating technical SEO metrics with ranking data, providing a more complete picture of how technical changes influence search engine results.

Key features

• Website Crawler: Configurable crawler to simulate search engine bots, analyzing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for technical SEO issues like broken links, redirect chains, and duplicate content.
• Log File Analyzer: Processes server log files to visualize actual search engine bot activity, providing insights into crawl budget usage, indexation patterns, and bot behavior on specific pages.
• Data Explorer: A customizable interface for querying and visualizing crawl and log data, allowing users to create custom dashboards and reports based on specific SEO metrics.
• SEO Impact Analysis: Tools to correlate technical SEO changes with organic search performance, identifying the impact of site structure or content modifications on rankings and traffic.
• Internal Linking Analysis: Provides detailed reports on internal link distribution, anchor text usage, and page depth to optimize site architecture for improved crawlability and authority flow.
• Duplicate Content Detection: Identifies potential duplicate content issues across a website, including pages with similar content, canonicalization problems, and thin content.
• Crawl Budget Optimization: Helps identify and address issues that may lead to inefficient crawl budget usage, such as excessive redirects, broken pages, or low-value content consuming crawl resources.
• API Access: Offers an API for programmatic access to crawling and log file data, enabling integration with custom reporting tools and internal SEO workflows for advanced analysis and automation.

Pricing

Oncrawl offers several subscription plans, primarily billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available for prospective users to evaluate the platform's features.

As of June 2026, the pricing structure is:

For detailed and up-to-date pricing information, refer to the Oncrawl pricing page.

Common integrations

Oncrawl offers various integration points to enhance data analysis and workflow automation:

• Google Search Console: Connects to import performance data and correlate it with crawl and log data.
• Google Analytics: Integrates to overlay user behavior metrics with technical SEO insights.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: While primarily a standalone desktop crawler, data from Screaming Frog can be exported and imported into Oncrawl for combined analysis, as described in various SEO workflows.
• Custom API Integrations: The Oncrawl API allows developers to pull raw data for custom dashboards, reporting tools, or integration into internal data analysis platforms. Further details are available in the Oncrawl support documentation.

Alternatives

For users evaluating technical SEO crawling and analysis tools, several alternatives exist:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A desktop application for technical SEO auditing, popular for its flexibility and extensive feature set for smaller to medium-sized sites.
• Botify: An enterprise-grade platform offering similar crawl, log, and ranking analysis capabilities, often used by larger organizations.
• Sitebulb: A website crawler that focuses on providing actionable insights and clear recommendations for SEO issues.

Getting started

Oncrawl provides an API for programmatic access to crawl data and reporting. The following Python example demonstrates how to make an authenticated request to retrieve a list of projects from the Oncrawl API. This example assumes you have an API key and secret, which can be generated from your Oncrawl account settings.

For full API documentation and endpoint details, consult the Oncrawl developer documentation.

import requests
import json

# Replace with your actual API key and secret
API_KEY = 'YOUR_ONCRAWL_API_KEY'
API_SECRET = 'YOUR_ONCRAWL_API_SECRET'

BASE_URL = 'https://api.oncrawl.com/v2'

headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'X-Auth-Key': API_KEY,
    'X-Auth-Secret': API_SECRET
}

def get_projects():
    endpoint = f'{BASE_URL}/projects/'
    try:
        response = requests.get(endpoint, headers=headers)
        response.raise_for_status() # Raise an HTTPError for bad responses (4xx or 5xx)
        projects = response.json()
        print("Successfully retrieved projects:")
        for project in projects['results']:
            print(f"- ID: {project['id']}, Name: {project['name']}")
    except requests.exceptions.HTTPError as http_err:
        print(f"HTTP error occurred: {http_err}")
        print(f"Response content: {response.text}")
    except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as conn_err:
        print(f"Connection error occurred: {conn_err}")
    except requests.exceptions.Timeout as timeout_err:
        print(f"Timeout error occurred: {timeout_err}")
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as req_err:
        print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {req_err}")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    get_projects()

This script connects to the Oncrawl API, authenticates using provided credentials, and fetches a list of all projects associated with the account. The response is then parsed and printed to the console, showing each project's ID and name. This serves as a basic starting point for integrating Oncrawl data into custom applications or scripts.