How to set a proxy in Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog crawls from your machine, so when a large audit needs to come from a different IP — or your office address keeps getting rate-limited — you point the SEO Spider at a proxy in the settings. The setup takes two minutes; the two things people miss are that the app must be restarted for the proxy to apply, and that it accepts only one proxy at a time, which changes how you approach rotation.

Before you start: proxy details and ports

You'll need your proxy IP address and port. Both are listed in your Dashboard — open your active subscription to see the full connection details. For Screaming Frog, use the HTTP ports:

Authentication	HTTP port	Good for
Username / password credentials from your Dashboard	`8080`	The usual choice — the settings have a Use Proxy Credentials option built in
IP whitelisting no login required	`8085`	Machines with a static IP — leave the credentials option off

With IP whitelisting, you first add your machine's IP address to the whitelist in the Dashboard — after that the proxy accepts connections from it with no credentials.

Step 1. Open the proxy settings

On Windows and Linux, go to File → Settings → Proxy. On macOS, it's Screaming Frog SEO Spider → Settings → Proxy in the menu bar. In older versions of the app the same window lives under Configuration → System → Proxy.

Step 2. Enter the proxy and restart

1. Tick Use Proxy Server.

2. Enter the Address (your proxy IP) and Port — for example 123.45.67.89 and 8080.

3. Tick Use Proxy Credentials and fill in the Username and Password from your Dashboard. On the whitelist port 8085, leave this option off.

4. Click OK and restart the application — the proxy settings only take effect after a restart. This is the step everyone forgets.

Step 3. Verify the connection

After the restart, crawl any URL — if pages come back with normal 200 responses, traffic is flowing through the proxy. Two response codes tell you something's wrong with the setup specifically: 407 Proxy Authentication Required means the credentials didn't reach the proxy or don't match, and immediate connection timeouts on every URL usually mean the address or port is wrong.

One proxy at a time: how to rotate IPs anyway

Screaming Frog has no proxy-list support — one address in the settings, that's it. That's fine for site audits, where requests to one site from one stable IP look natural. When it isn't enough — huge crawls, targets that throttle single IPs — put a rotating proxy in the same settings field: to Screaming Frog it's still one gateway address, but the exit IP rotates on every request, so the target site sees the crawl spread across a whole pool.

For routine audits, a dedicated proxy — sold from a single IP — is the economical option: the address is reserved exclusively for you, so its reputation with target sites is yours to keep clean. Which of our proxy types fits SEO crawling best, with pricing and specs, is broken down on the proxies for Screaming Frog page.

If something doesn't work

The most common causes: the proxy seems ignored after saving — the app wasn't restarted, do that first; 407 responses mean wrong credentials, or credentials sent to the whitelist port 8085 (that combination fails) — match the port to the authentication method from the table; every URL timing out means the address or port has a typo, or on port 8085 the machine's IP isn't whitelisted in the Dashboard; and a crawl that starts fine but degrades into 429/403 responses is the target site throttling your single IP — that's the case for the rotating setup above. If none of these is it, message us in live chat right on this page — we'll help you get connected.