AdAlign vs Screaming Frog: Crawl the Page or Score the Ad

A crawler reports a 200 status. It cannot report that the 200 is the wrong page for the ad. If you manage Meta and Google Ads under €75,000 a month of spend and need each live ad's page to still say what the ad says, pick AdAlign. It costs from €590 a month on an annual contract billed monthly (AdAlign pricing, checked on 27 October 2026). Test it on one ad with the free audit. If the question is only whether those pages load, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider answers it for free, up to 500 URLs.

Disclosure: I earn a commission if you buy AdAlign through a link on this page, and this page recommends it. Every claim about AdAlign links to AdAlign's own pages.

Before you crawl anything:

1. Count the URLs, and the people. For example, an agency with 14 clients averaging 40 final URLs each has 14 x 40 = 560 URLs. That is over the free limit of 500, so the crawl needs a licence at £199 a year. Licences are per user: three media buyers who each run it need 3 x £199 = £597 a year (Screaming Frog pricing).
2. Start from the URLs you set, then add the ones the platforms chose. A final URL is the page you specify for each ad (Google Ads Help). Google's landing pages report adds the pages Final URL expansion picked, marked in its Selected by column (Google Ads Help). Both lists go into the crawl.
3. Define what passing means. Every URL returns 200 with no redirect chain. Then every page that loads scores 5 or more against its ad, the line below which AdAlign counts spend as at risk (how it works).

A 200 is not a match

The SEO Spider is a crawler that audits a site for over 300 SEO issues (SEO Spider). Broken links and server errors, temporary and permanent redirects, chains and loops, titles, directives, duplicates. For a paid team, those first checks earn their keep. An ad that points at a 404 burns every click, and a crawl finds it.

But the crawler stops at the page. It never sees the ad, so a page that loads perfectly and has quietly dropped the offer passes. AdAlign starts from the other end. It reads every live ad, creative and destination URL from Meta and Google Ads, read-only. Then it scores each pair on visual match, message match, above-the-fold continuity and tone (how it works). Broken links still count. A broken link is one of the three issue types the paid pilot looks for (pricing). The other two are a page that does not match its ad and a page that has drifted.

The free crawl, step by step

For a small account this is enough on its own, and it costs nothing under 500 URLs.

1. Export the final URLs of every live ad from Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager, and add the pages from Google's landing pages report.
2. In the SEO Spider, choose Mode, then List, and upload the file. Crawl depth is set to 0, so only the uploaded URLs are crawled (list mode).
3. Turn on Always Follow Redirects so each chain is crawled to its end, and read the All Redirects report for chains.
4. Export with the button beside Upload and Start. It keeps your original order and duplicates, so each row lines up with its ad again.
5. Fix every 4xx and 5xx and collapse every chain. Then put the five highest-spend pages that returned 200 through the AdAlign free audit.

Step 5 is where the crawler's job ends. The alignment check starts there.

Why the URL list is never complete

The list you export is correct, and still incomplete, through no fault of yours. It is where the platforms start, not where they stop. Meta switches on Optimise website destination as soon as you enter a website URL on a single image or video ad in a sales campaign. That lets Meta send a shopper to your home page, a product page or a collection page instead, wherever it predicts a conversion (Meta Business Help). The default serves Meta's conversion model, and your crawl list misses every page it chose. Which pages did Meta pick for your shoppers last week? Performance Max does the same on Google, with Final URL expansion on by default (Google Ads Help). Re-export the landing pages report before every crawl. Score what Google chose, not only what you set.

What each costs

Read on 27 October 2026. The SEO Spider is free to 500 URLs. The licence is £199 a year per user, falling to £189 for 5 to 9 licences, £179 for 10 to 19 and £169 for 20 or more (pricing). AdAlign is priced on monitored ad spend: Growth from €590 a month up to €75,000, Scale from €1,290 up to €250,000, Portfolio from €2,490 up to €750,000. Those are annual contracts billed monthly, excluding VAT, with unlimited seats, after a €1,500 paid pilot credited to the first invoices (AdAlign pricing).

Choose AdAlign if

• Your job is checking that every live ad's promise is on the page it opens, not only that the page opens.
• You want the check to run itself daily, with alerts when a page drifts or a score drops.
• You need the pages ranked by what their mismatches cost, for clients or a web team.

Choose Screaming Frog if

• Your job is technical: status codes, redirect chains, broken links, titles, directives, across a whole site.
• You are auditing a migration, where list mode and redirect reports are built for the task.
• You want a desktop tool with a one-off yearly licence and no connection to your ad accounts.

Keep both. Crawl the final URLs with Screaming Frog before a big launch. After it, let AdAlign check every ad against its page, every day.

Free first, then the paid path

Run the five-step crawl above, then the AdAlign free audit on the pages that pass. If the scores come back below 5 on ads with real spend, AdAlign, which pays me a commission, is the next step. The demo connects one ad account read-only and scores every live ad on the call. Then the pilot, then a band. The AdAlign glossary entry covers the rest.

FAQ

Can Screaming Frog crawl the pages Meta picks for an ad?

Only if you know them and add them to the list. Optimise website destination lets Meta choose the page for each customer. The crawl covers only the pages you can name.

Does AdAlign find broken landing pages?

Its paid pilot looks for them. Broken links are one of the issue types it counts toward the 3 real issues that decide the refund (pricing).

Could the SEO Spider's AI prompts do the comparison?

Not as documented. The prompts run against what the crawler extracts from each page, such as page text or HTML, and on the paid licence only (AI tutorial). The ad is not part of the crawl, so the ad-to-page comparison is not in it.