Best bulk SEO tools compared, for checking thousands of URLs at once
Bulk means one of three things: many URLs, many keywords, or many domains. Each has a different right tool and a different limit that sets your bill, and the free option is larger than most people think.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026
Bulk is a vague word hiding three distinct jobs, and the tools do not overlap. Checking ten thousand URLs on one site is a crawler problem. Checking ten thousand keywords is a plan tier problem. Checking ten thousand domains is an API problem. Buy for the wrong one and you hit a wall in the first hour.
The criterion on this page: what is the published unit the vendor meters, and what is the ceiling on it? In bulk work the ceiling is the product.
The three jobs and their published ceilings
| Job | Right tool | Published ceiling, read 21 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Many URLs on one site: status codes, titles, canonicals, redirects | A desktop crawler | Screaming Frog publishes a free crawl limit of 500 URLs and notes on its own pricing page that the maximum you can crawl with a licence depends on allocated memory and storage. That is an unusually honest ceiling: the limit is your machine, not a plan tier. |
| Many URLs, scheduled, reported to other people | A cloud crawler | Sitebulb publishes Cloud for crawling at scale with crawl automation and automated reporting, separate from Desktop for local crawling. |
| Many keywords tracked | A rank tracker or suite | Semrush publishes 500 keywords tracked daily and 5 websites to monitor on its entry SEO tier. Rank Math publishes 50,000 tracked keywords on its agency tier and support for 500 client websites. |
| Many domains or links queried | A link index with an API | Majestic publishes its Lite account as 1 million analysis units, 5,000 Site Explorer data rows per search, 5,000 analysis depth, 60 report units a month and no API access at that tier, which is the clearest statement of a bulk ceiling in this market. Semrush meters its API per row of data returned rather than per request, so a loose query is an expensive one. |
The free bulk work most people do not realise they can do
Five hundred URLs crawled free covers a complete small site including every tag, category and paginated page the platform generated. Search Console exports every query and page it recorded for your property at no cost and with no row limit you will hit by hand. Between those two you can do a genuine bulk audit of a small site for nothing, and the only thing you cannot do free is bulk work about somebody else.
The unit that catches people out
Rows, not requests. If a vendor meters per row returned, a query with a loose filter can cost many times what you expected, and the bill arrives after the experiment. Before any bulk API run, run it once with a hard limit, read the row count, and multiply. The same applies to keyword plans: keywords multiplied by checks per keyword is the real number you are buying, and a plan that publishes only the keyword count is not telling you the whole unit.
The one check none of these tools runs, and who sells it
Every tool on this page measures a search engine. None of them measures the other place your buyer now asks, which is an assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews compose an answer for each asker, naming some businesses and not others, and there is no index a crawler can read to find out whose name came up. There is a bulk version of it too, which is asking many buyer questions rather than one, and the unit there is a credit per question per app, which is why that arithmetic deserves the same scrutiny as a row count.
AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else. We are not an SEO tool and we are not in the ranking above, because a buyer who came here for a crawler or a keyword index should buy one of the tools named above instead. What we do is ask your buyer question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named. Our own figures, from the rendered text of our llms.txt read on 21 October 2026: one credit is one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost one credit and a Claude check costs three because Claude costs more to run. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and that same file says SEO Start watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand harvest rather than an engine watch. The first tier that watches the five engines is Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. A managed option is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month at a three month minimum, so we are not going to convert it for you.
Where the tools on this page beat us, plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read on 21 October 2026, tracks prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. AI Mode and Copilot are two surfaces we do not read at all, and its page publishes an overage price of $0.020 per check and the cost of a Claude update at 8 checks, which is a level of unit disclosure worth holding every vendor to, us included. Semrush, whose SEO and AI search pricing page we read the same day, sells AI visibility inside the suite you may already be paying for, with 50 prompts tracked daily and 300 AI visibility reports a day on its Starter tier. Moz now publishes AI Explorer, described on moz.com as showing what the top AI agents say about your brand. If you already pay one of those three, their module is the cheaper route and you should take it. We are the single purpose option for somebody who does not want a suite.
A bulk method that does not produce a surprise bill
No competitor price table is reproduced on this page. What is quoted instead is the published limit that sets a tier, because a limit is the vendor's own statement of what you get and it does not move with the country you are reading from. That matters more than it sounds: on 21 October 2026 a fetch of one vendor's US pricing page from this machine returned Indian rupee prices, because the request left from an Indian address. A 200 response can still be the wrong page.
Crawl free first and find out how big the site really is, because platforms generate more URLs than anybody expects. Decide which templates matter and crawl those rather than everything. Export rows, not reports. And for anything metered, run a small sample, read the unit consumed, and only then run the batch.
On the crawlers themselves and the limit that sets each tier: SEO spider software compared, and the limit that sets each tier. On 21 October 2026 we read every link we could see on this site, 2,169 page bodies in all, against 2,082 live pages, and 935 of them, 44.9 percent, had no inbound link from any of those bodies. That figure is an upper bound rather than a count. No other page on this site links to the one above.
Questions about bulk SEO tools
What is the best free bulk URL checker?
A desktop crawler within its free limit, which Screaming Frog publishes as 500 URLs. For your own pages as Google saw them, a Search Console export.
How do I check thousands of backlinks at once?
A link index with bulk checking, and read the published row ceiling first. Majestic publishes rows per search and report units a month on its Lite tier.
Why did my API bill come out higher than expected?
Usually because the meter is rows returned rather than calls made. Sample first, read the rows, then scale.
Can I crawl a site I do not own?
Technically often yes, and politely at a slow rate while respecting robots directives. Free tiers of third party suites restrict their deeper data to properties you verify.
How many URLs is too many for a desktop crawl?
The vendor's own answer is that it depends on your memory and storage. In practice a few hundred thousand is normal on a decent machine with storage mode enabled.