SEO Spider
How To Set Up Crawl Email Notifications & Export Attachments
Introduction
The SEO Spider email notification feature lets you stay informed about your crawls without ever opening the application. Whether you’re monitoring a single site or managing scheduled crawls across multiple projects, notifications let you work smarter by bringing the data to your inbox.
There are several powerful ways to use this feature:
- Crawl completion alerts: Know the moment a crawl has finished, even when the app is running in the background or on a remote machine.
- Passive site health monitoring: By combining scheduled crawls with Auto Compare, you can track SEO health over time, flagging spikes in errors, newly appearing issues, or changes in indexability. All without lifting a finger.
- Change detection without opening the app: The notification email now includes a full issues table, and when comparing crawls, it highlights exactly what has changed since the last run.
- Stakeholder and developer updates: Attach specific exports, like broken links, SEO Issues summary or custom extraction directly to the notification email and send them to the right people automatically. No manual exports, no back-and-forth.
This tutorial covers everything you need to get set up: configuring email notifications for both ad-hoc and scheduled crawls, using Auto Compare to monitor website changes, sending export attachments, and skipping empty reports.
Setting Up Email Notifications
Email notifications can be configured at two levels: globally for all crawls, or specifically within a scheduled crawl task. To set up for either, first you must set up an account to send them from.
Configuring Send From Email
The notifications settings allow you to connect to an email account and send an email from this account on crawl completion to selected email addresses.
Go to ‘File > Settings > Notifications’ and select an Outlook or Gmail account, or set up custom SMTP settings to send email notifications from.
If you select Gmail, please remember to confirm the ‘Send email on your behalf’ box during authorisation, or emails will not send.
There are two ways to send emails on crawl completion.
Configuring Email Notifications for All Crawls
Enable the ‘Email on Crawl Complete’ option to send an email when a crawl finishes for every crawl to specified email addresses.
This is useful when a user or team want to know when any crawl has completed.
The email delivered confirms crawl completion and provides top-level data from the crawl, as well as an Issues table below.
Configuring Email Notifications for Scheduled Crawls
Alternatively, send notification emails for specific scheduled crawls upon completion using the ‘Notifications’ tab in the scheduled crawl task via ‘File > Scheduling > Scheduled Crawl Task’.
This is useful when a user or team want to know when a specific crawl has completed only.
This provides the same crawl completion summmary email with an an Issues table below.
Configuring Email Notifications using CLI
Anything you can do in scheduled crawls, you can replicate using the command line.
If you wish to send an email for a CLI crawl, then ensure the email account to send notifications is configered in the GUI via ‘File > Settings > Notifications’ and then use the following argument.
--email-on-complete "email"
For example:
--email-on-complete "[email protected]"
Monitoring Site Health with Auto Compare Crawls
An extremely powerful feature for scheduled crawls is to ‘Auto Compare Crawls’. This will compare the two most recent crawls within a project and highlight changes directly in your notification email.
How to Enable Auto Compare
This can be selected directly within the scheduled crawl task ‘General’ settings.
Ensure Singular Project Set Up : The auto compare option will run a crawl comparison for the two most recent crawls within a project folder. So ensure your scheduled crawls are within their own separate project folders for each domain, to avoid comparing completely different sites!
When Auto Compare is enabled, the crawl completion notification email is upgraded significantly.
Instead of just a summary and issues table, it includes a full crawl comparison — a table that highlights the changes in SEO issues between the last two crawls.
This means you can see at a glance:
- New pages that have been added or removed.
- A sudden spike in non-indexable pages.
- Page titles that have appeared or disappeared.
- Changes in error counts, redirect volumes, or any other tracked issue!
All of this is delivered to your inbox without ever needing to open the application – making it an ideal passive monitoring and crawl alert solution for ongoing site health checks or client reporting.
If you’re interested in automated monitoring of website health, then consider also setting up Automated Crawl Reports In Data Studio.
How to Enable Auto Compare using CLI
If you wish to enable auto compare for a command line crawl, then use the following argument.
--project-crawl-comparison "true"
This alone will not send an email notification, and needs to be combined with the correct CL argument.
--email-on-complete "email"
Sending Export Attachments via Email
You can now attach specific crawl exports directly to your notification emails. This makes it straightforward to send targeted data to developers, stakeholders, or clients automatically on a scheduled basis — no manual export steps required.
How to Set Up Export Attachments
In your scheduled crawl task (‘File > Scheduling > Scheduled Crawl Task’), select the exports you want to send under ‘Exports > Spreadsheets’.
Then return to ‘Notifications’ and move any selected spreadsheets chosen for export that you also wish to send via email from ‘Available’ to ‘Selected’.
For example, if you need to send a weekly broken links export to a developer, or a crawl issues summary to a stakeholder, you can input their email and the report of choice and it will appear in their inbox.
Some common workflows this enables:
- Weekly broken links to a developer: Schedule a crawl, attach the internal broken links export, and send directly to the development team every Monday morning.
- Monthly SEO summary to a stakeholder: Attach the Issues Overview report to give stakeholders a high-level view of site health without sharing access to the tool.
- Ad-hoc reports: Send ad-hoc attachments at the end of the crawl automatically, without having to manually re-open the crawl, export, attach and send.
A Note on File Size : Attachments are automatically zipped before sending. If an attachment exceeds your email provider’s size limit, the recipient will receive a warning in the email body. For large sites with extensive exports, it’s worth testing attachment size before relying on this for critical reporting.
Please see our FAQ on ‘Why are attachments missing in notification emails?‘ for more on email provider size limits.
How to Skip Empty Reports
When running scheduled crawls on healthy sites, some reports may come back empty.
For instance, if there are no broken links, no redirect chains, or no pages with missing titles. Attaching empty files adds noise, can cause confusion for recipients or be a complete waste of their time opening to see if there is data there.
The ‘Skip Empty Reports’ setting was introduced to handle this cleanly.
This option is available in two places:
- Scheduled crawl tasks: In the ‘Output Settings’ tab of the scheduled crawl task configuration.
- Manual multi-exports: In ‘Bulk Export > Multi Export > Output Settings’ when exporting multiple reports at once.
When enabled, any export that contains no data will simply be excluded from the output and from email attachments.
Recipients won’t receive empty spreadsheets, and scheduled folders won’t fill up with blank files.
Summary
Email notifications in Screaming Frog SEO Spider give you a powerful, largely hands-off way to stay on top of site health and share crawl data with the right people.
Get in touch with our support team with any queries.
