Guide

How to find orphan pages in Screaming Frog (and a free alternative)

Steps for finding orphan pages with Screaming Frog Crawl Analysis, what counts as an orphan in each tool, and a free crawl-based alternative.

By Sunny Patel · Updated 2026-09-20

An orphan page is a URL that exists and works but has no path leading into it from your site's own internal links. Screaming Frog finds these by comparing what a crawl discovers against outside sources that already know a URL exists, such as your sitemap or your Search Console data. This guide covers the steps in Screaming Frog, what the term actually means there versus in a pure crawl tool, and a free alternative for a fast check.

What you need before you start

The free version of the SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs. The orphan URL report needs more than a bigger crawl to work: it needs at least one outside data source connected before you crawl, your XML sitemap, Google Search Console, or Google Analytics, and connecting Search Console or Analytics requires a paid licence. Screaming Frog can only flag a URL as orphaned if it knows that URL exists from one of these sources in the first place. A crawl run with no sitemap and no connected accounts will not surface any orphans, because it has nothing external to compare its own crawl against.

Finding orphan pages step by step

1. Connect your data sources before crawling. In the configuration menu, connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics under their respective API sections, and point the crawl at your XML sitemap under the sitemap configuration options. Each source you connect adds more URLs to compare against your site's own link graph.
2. Run the crawl from your homepage or another representative start point, the same way you would for a normal technical audit.
3. Once the crawl finishes, run Crawl Analysis from the top-level menu. This is a separate step from the crawl itself. It processes the finished crawl data against the connected sources; it does not run live.
4. Open the Sitemaps tab, or the equivalent tab for whichever source you connected, and filter for the orphan URLs report. These are the URLs that source knows about but that the crawler itself never reached by following a link.
5. Check each flagged URL by hand before acting. A URL in Search Console because it used to rank, but which you have since deliberately removed from navigation, is not a bug. A genuinely valuable page missing a link is.
6. Add a real internal link to any page worth keeping, or remove and let the rest 404 or redirect if it should not exist as a live page any more.

Menu names and tab positions can shift slightly between Screaming Frog versions. If a label above does not match what you see, look for the action it describes, connecting a data source, then running an analysis step after the crawl. The exact wording matters less.

What "orphan" means changes depending on the tool

Screaming Frog's orphan report is really measuring a mismatch between your site and outside knowledge of it: a sitemap entry, a Search Console impression, or an Analytics session tied to a URL your own crawl never reached by following links. That is a genuinely useful check, because it catches pages that used to be linked, still get some traffic or search visibility, and quietly lost their internal path in a redesign.

A pure crawl-based check works differently. sitemap.digital, for example, defines an orphan as a page that returns a normal response and has zero inbound links from any other page found in that same crawl. It does not check Search Console or Analytics at all. It is narrower by design: it only tells you about the shape of your site's own link graph as it exists right now, not about pages a search engine remembers from before. The orphan pages guide covers that definition and the fixes for it in full. Neither definition is more correct than the other. They catch different failure modes, which is why running both is worth doing on a site where orphan pages are a real recurring problem.

A free alternative for a fast check

If you do not have a Screaming Frog licence, or you just want a quick answer without connecting Search Console and Analytics first, sitemap.digital runs a free crawl and flags every orphan page it finds using the link-graph definition above. Paste a URL, and it checks up to 20 pages with no signup, 50 with a free email unlock, and crawls a site with a usable sitemap listing 150 pages or fewer to completion, with no cap applied; a site with no sitemap, crawled by following links, stays at the 20 or 50 page cap.

The caveat matters: on a site larger than the cap, the orphan check only covers the pages actually crawled in that pass, so it will not catch a page sitting entirely outside the crawled sample. sitemap.digital suppresses the orphan verdict altogether on a capped scan instead of reporting a partial count as if it covered the whole site. The standalone orphan page checker also follows that same rule. Screaming Frog's connected-source approach does not have that limit in the same way, since a sitemap or Search Console export can cover a site's full URL list regardless of crawl size. Use the free tool for a fast first look on a small to mid-sized site, and reach for Screaming Frog Crawl Analysis, or the same feature inside Semrush's Site Audit tool, once a site is large enough that a single crawl cannot see all of it and you need the sitemap and Search Console cross-check to fill the gap.

A short note on Semrush

Semrush's Site Audit tool can surface orphan pages using the same logic as Screaming Frog's Crawl Analysis: it compares a crawl against connected Google Analytics or Search Console data and flags URLs those sources know about that the crawl itself never reached. It requires a paid Semrush plan with Site Audit access and the same source connections Screaming Frog needs to be useful. Choose between the two mainly on which platform you already pay for. The underlying check is much the same either way.

If XML sitemaps, not orphan pages specifically, are what you actually need to compare, the sitemap generator comparison covers XML, WordPress and visual options side by side.

For a wider technical read on a site beyond orphan pages alone, covering crawl depth, broken links and AI crawlability together in one pass, see the full site audit.

Frequently asked questions