Preview Post- October 3, 2026
Back in May, I had the chance to speak at Athens SEO, which also happened to be my first time speaking at an international SEO conference.
I have spoken at a handful of SEO events in the UK, but taking a talk abroad felt like a bit of a milestone. It was a brilliant experience, both getting the opportunity to speak and spending time with people from the wider international SEO community.
My talk was called Automating Technical SEO with Screaming Frog CLI and n8n.
The main idea was fairly simple. Screaming Frog already gives us a huge amount of technical SEO data, but a lot of what happens around the crawl is still surprisingly manual. The CLI gives us a way to run Screaming Frog headlessly, while n8n can handle the scheduling, processing and movement of that data between different parts of a workflow.
I started with the basics of Screaming Frog CLI, including running headless crawls, using saved configuration files and exporting the data you actually need. From there, the talk moved into building real workflows around that data rather than just running scheduled crawls.
Most of the examples were based on workflows I had been experimenting with myself. That included triggering a Screaming Frog crawl from an email, processing the crawl output and sending a summary back automatically. I also covered an XML sitemap monitor that compares changes over time, a product price and stock monitor using JSON-LD, and a technical SEO triage workflow that pushes useful findings into Google Sheets, Google Chat and Gmail.
A big part of the talk was also about preparing crawl data properly before sending it further downstream. There is very little value in throwing huge CSV exports into another system when you can strip out the noise first and work with a much smaller, cleaner dataset.
The wider point was that Screaming Frog can become much more than a crawler. Once you can control it through the CLI, process the output and connect it to other tools, you can start building your own monitoring, reporting and technical SEO systems around it.
One thing I tried to get across in the presentation was that this stuff involves a fair bit of trial and error. Start on smaller websites, put safeguards into the workflows and make sure they can stop when something does not look right. Once you are confident the workflow is behaving properly, then start scaling it up.
You also do not necessarily need a huge infrastructure stack. Spare local hardware, a small server or a cloud VM can be enough to run crawls and automations in the background, depending on the size of the sites you are working with.
Athens was a big one for me personally. Speaking internationally had been something I wanted to do for a while, so getting the opportunity to do it in 2026 was a really nice milestone.
It also gave me the chance to take something I had been experimenting with for months and put it in front of a completely different audience. The conversations afterwards were probably my favourite part, particularly hearing how other people were thinking about automation and where they could apply the same ideas in their own work.
Hopefully it will not be the last international one!
If you want to go through the full deck, I have uploaded the complete presentation to Speaker Deck, including the example workflows and Screaming Frog CLI commands used throughout the session. View the Athens SEO presentation on Speaker Deck
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