How many pages can a free SEO crawler check?
SEO by Zaweba is free and crawls up to 500 pages of your site and 40 per competitor site by default, with every limit adjustable in Settings.
By default, SEO by Zaweba crawls up to 500 pages of your own site and up to 40 pages of each competitor site, and it is free software, so those numbers are not a trial or a paid tier. They are settings. Under Settings, Limits you can change the pages crawled on your site, the pages per competitor site and how many competitors are crawled, so the real limit is the one you choose.
Why there are limits at all
Every crawl costs time, and every request is a small load on someone's server. SEO by Zaweba crawls politely: it obeys robots.txt, identifies itself with an honest user agent and waits at least a second between requests to each site by default, or longer if robots.txt asks for a Crawl-delay of up to 10 seconds. At that pace, 500 pages takes a while. The defaults are set so a normal audit finishes in reasonable time while still covering most small business sites completely.
Competitor sites get a smaller allowance because the aim is different. The app looks at how the top three competitors link their pages internally, and a sample of 40 pages is usually enough to see their structure without crawling someone else's whole site.
What the Limits card controls
Settings, Limits holds the pages to crawl on your site, the pages per competitor site, how many competitors are crawled (the top N results, 10 by default), how many links are checked per page, how many images are sized per page, the percentage of results kept in a modifier split, and a switch for competitor strength lookups.
The link and image limits matter more than they look. Checking every link for breakage and measuring every image's size means extra requests per page, so on very large pages these caps keep a single page from taking minutes.
Choosing your own numbers
If your site has more than 500 pages, raise the site limit before you rely on site-wide findings such as orphan pages, duplicate titles or keyword cannibalisation. A crawl that stops early can't see pages it never reached, and those pages would wrongly look orphaned. The crawler works breadth first, so with a small limit it still covers the pages closest to where it starts before going deeper.
For a quick look, lower limits are fine. If you only want to compare one page with the pages above it, you don't need a site crawl at all; the step 4 crawl of the top results is separate and uses the same checks as your page.
Be more careful with competitor limits. Raising them a little is reasonable, but crawling large parts of other people's sites is rarely needed for the comparison and puts load on servers you don't run.
Other things free here
Nothing in SEO by Zaweba requires a paid service. Optional integrations such as PageSpeed Insights, the Search Console API, Serper and DataForSEO use your own keys if you want them, but every feature works without them. The results, history and reports stay on your PC, and there is no account. Note that the settings say how many pages are crawled, not how fast, so a bigger limit means a longer wait rather than a different result.
