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- October 24, 2026
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of speaking at BrightonSEO, something I’d been looking forward to for quite some time, although I must admit that as the day approached, the nerves started making an appearance alongside the excitement.
I’ve attended plenty of SEO conferences over the years, but there’s something quite different about being the person standing at the front of the room rather than sitting in the audience. No matter how familiar you are with your subject, there’s always that little voice wondering whether everything will go to plan, whether the demonstrations will behave themselves and, perhaps most importantly, whether people will find what you’ve got to say interesting.
Thankfully, I needn’t have worried quite so much, as the whole experience turned out to be one of the highlights of my year.
My presentation was titled Getting Under the Hood of Screaming Frog CLI, a subject that anyone who’s followed my recent experiments will know I’ve become rather enthusiastic about.
I’ve been using Screaming Frog for years, but over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly interested in what can be achieved through its command-line interface, particularly when you start combining it with Python, automation and relatively inexpensive hardware.
What fascinates me is how much capability we already have available to us without necessarily realising it. Screaming Frog is a fantastic desktop application, but its CLI opens up opportunities to build repeatable technical SEO data collection processes that can run without somebody sitting in front of a screen clicking buttons.
The presentation was an opportunity to share some of the things I’ve been experimenting with, explain my approach and hopefully encourage a few more people to explore an area of the tool that I think is still rather underappreciated.
I’m not suggesting that everybody needs to start writing Python scripts or building their own automation infrastructure, but I do believe there’s enormous value in understanding what’s possible, especially as the industry moves towards more automated and agentic workflows.
It was particularly encouraging to receive such positive feedback afterwards, especially from people who were already working on similar ideas or were interested in having a go themselves.
One of my favourite moments of the conference actually happened before I’d even delivered my presentation, when I was invited to join the Dutch SEO collective SEO Brain for a podcast recorded live at the BrightonSEO venue.
Link to podcast: https://app.springcast.fm/12694/chris-lever-over-screaming-frog-zonder-scherm-crawls-automatiseren-met-cli-n8n-en-claude-code
It was a lovely opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with people who share a genuine enthusiasm for technical SEO, and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting about the things I’ve been experimenting with and where I think some of these technologies are heading.
I also met a Dutch SEO practitioner who had independently been building his own systems around Screaming Frog CLI, which immediately gave us plenty to talk about. It’s not every day you bump into somebody who’s been exploring the same fairly niche corner of an application, particularly when you discover that you’ve both been approaching similar challenges from slightly different directions.
I’ve always been somebody who enjoys taking things apart, figuring out how they work and seeing whether I can make them do something they weren’t necessarily designed to do. Much of what I build starts with a simple question or an idea that I want to test, so discovering that those experiments are interesting to people beyond my own little corner of the SEO industry is incredibly rewarding.
I also want to give a special mention to the wider Dutch SEO community, who were absolutely fantastic throughout the event. I met some genuinely lovely people, had several fascinating conversations and came away with a real appreciation for the enthusiasm and knowledge being shared across their community.
It’s experiences like these that remind me just how international our industry has become, and how a shared interest in something as niche as command-line crawling can bring people together from different countries.
Although speaking was obviously the main reason for my visit, one of the things I was looking forward to most was catching up with people from across the SEO community.
Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know some brilliant people through conferences, online conversations and, more recently, through organising TechSEO North with Nikki Halliwell. BrightonSEO gave me the opportunity to catch up with quite a few of them, alongside meeting people I’d previously only spoken to online.
There’s something particularly enjoyable about finally meeting somebody in person after spending months or even years exchanging ideas on LinkedIn, especially when the conversation picks up almost immediately as though you’ve known each other for ages.
I also had the opportunity to spend time with my colleagues from Glass Atlas, who were incredibly supportive throughout the conference. It’s always reassuring to have familiar faces around when you’re preparing to speak, and I appreciated having colleagues there to share the experience with.
Between the presentations, conversations and catching up with people, the conference seemed to fly by, and I came away feeling that I’d barely scratched the surface of everybody I wanted to speak to.
Something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently is how much my relationship with the SEO industry has changed over the years.
I started working professionally in SEO back in 2011, and although the tools, technologies and challenges have changed enormously since then, the thing that’s kept me interested has always been the opportunity to learn, experiment and solve problems.
More recently, I’ve found myself spending an increasing amount of time exploring technical SEO data collection and automation, often outside working hours simply because I enjoy it. Some experiments work brilliantly, others go absolutely nowhere, but there’s usually something useful to learn along the way.
What BrightonSEO reinforced for me is that there are plenty of other people out there who share that same curiosity, even when the subject matter is fairly specialised.
Being on the other side of the microphone at BrightonSEO gave me an even greater appreciation for everybody who volunteers their time to speak at industry events. There’s quite a bit of preparation involved, and putting yourself in front of an audience can be daunting, but the conversations and connections that follow make it worthwhile.
I’m increasingly enjoying this side of the industry, and it’s certainly something I’d like to do more of over the coming years.
For anybody who attended my session and would like to revisit the material, or for those who couldn’t make it to BrightonSEO, I’ve published my presentation on Speaker Deck.
Getting Under the Hood of Screaming Frog CLI
Link to presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/chrisleverseo/getting-under-the-hood-of-screaming-frog-cli-for-automating-technical-seo-brightonseo-2026
The presentation covers my approach to using Screaming Frog CLI for automated technical SEO data collection, alongside some of the practical experiments and workflows I’ve been developing.
Hopefully, it’ll encourage a few people to have a go themselves and discover some of the capabilities that have been sitting inside Screaming Frog all along.
I’d like to finish by thanking the BrightonSEO team for giving me the opportunity to speak, along with everybody who attended my session, took the time to ask questions or came over for a chat afterwards.
A special thank you also goes to the Dutch SEO community for making me feel so welcome, to the SEO Brain team for inviting me onto their podcast, and to my colleagues and friends across the industry who made the whole experience so enjoyable.
I travelled down to Brighton feeling a mixture of nerves and excitement, but returned home with some wonderful memories, new friendships and plenty of ideas for future experiments.
After more than fifteen years working in SEO, it’s rather nice to find that I’m still discovering new things to get excited about, and even nicer to have opportunities to share them with people who are just as curious as I am.
Here’s to more tinkering, more conversations and hopefully a few more opportunities to get up on stage.
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