If you manage a complex website and you’ve outgrown desktop crawlers, Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl) is likely the most complete “website intelligence” platform you can put at the center of your technical SEO, performance, and accessibility governance. After leading growth initiatives for 18+ years, I’ve used a lot of tools; at Eventbrite we rely on Lumar as our primary technical SEO system of record because it scales, slots neatly into engineering workflows, and converts audits into business-ready insights.
Who Lumar is for, and why it’s different
Lumar is built for teams that need to audit and monitor very large, frequently changing sites without babysitting a crawler or juggling five different tools. It brings four core applications—Analyze (deep crawls), Monitor (ongoing health tracking), Protect (pre-release SEO QA), and Impact (executive-ready reporting)—into a single cloud platform designed for SEOs, engineers, product managers, and CMOs alike. That breadth is what separates it from desktop spiders: you get technical SEO diagnostics, Core Web Vitals and performance views, accessibility checks against WCAG, alerting, CI/CD integrations, and polished dashboards in one place.
Where it shines most is scale and prevention. The crawler comfortably handles millions of URLs at speeds up to hundreds of URLs per second and renders JavaScript at scale, all on Lumar’s infrastructure—not your laptop. And with Protect wired into your build pipeline, it can block regressions (e.g., noindex on key templates, broken canonicals) before they hit production. For leadership, Impact translates raw crawl data into simple “site quality” narratives so non-technical stakeholders can track risk and progress without parsing spreadsheets.
If you run a small site and mainly need a quick one-off audit, a desktop crawler will be cheaper. But if uptime, consistency, and cross-team visibility matter—and you need governance across multiple regions, brands, or environments—Lumar is purpose-built for you.
What is Lumar? A clear definition
Lumar is an enterprise website optimization platform that evolved from Deepcrawl’s well-known SEO spider into a broader “website intelligence” suite. The rebrand expanded its remit beyond technical SEO audits to include continuous monitoring, automated QA in development workflows, and business-facing reporting. Practically, you get four coordinated apps:
- Analyze: a cloud crawler with 350+ reports covering crawlability, indexability, duplication, JavaScript rendering outcomes, metadata health, performance and accessibility.
- Monitor: multi-site, multi-environment monitoring with trend lines, delta views, and alerts that catch changes as they happen across your properties.
- Protect: hooks into CI/CD to test staging or preview builds and stop bad SEO changes before deploy. Think “unit tests for SEO” applied to templates and releases.
- Impact: high-level dashboards and benchmarks that translate technical findings for execs, giving you a “site quality” narrative and KPI rollups.
One panel I love is the Quality dashboard’s funnel that shows the progression of pages from “available” to “indexable,” “unique,” and “rankable.” It makes scale problems instantly legible and forces prioritization. Accessibility checks (alt text, contrast, headings structure, etc.) sit alongside SEO and performance—so you’re governing total site health, not just bots.
How I evaluate tools like Lumar (and how we use it)
My evaluation criteria are straightforward: (1) crawl scale & rendering accuracy, (2) actionability (how fast teams can triage and fix), (3) governance coverage (SEO + performance + accessibility), (4) workflow fit (alerting, CI/CD, ticketing), (5) data portability (warehouse & BI), and (6) stakeholder communication (clarity for non-SEO leaders). Lumar scores highly on each dimension thanks to the four-app architecture, the speed of its crawler, CI/CD hooks, and its integrations (GA, GSC, BigQuery, Jira/Trello, BI tools).
Operationally, we run scheduled Monitor crawls on critical templates (listing, category, event pages), feed URL-level results into BigQuery for custom scoring, and gate releases with Protect tests for indexation hazards. Impact gives me an executive snapshot I can share across marketing and product without translation. This mix reduces firefighting and surfaces changes before revenue is at stake.
The four Lumar apps, unpacked with practical use cases
Analyze is your deep-audit engine. Use segmentation to crawl by template or directory, and custom extraction to pull fields like schema types, price/availability, or canonical-target patterns. Out-of-the-box, you get reports on 250+ elements: broken links, redirect loops, duplicate/thin content, multi-H1s, pagination, hreflang, orphaned pages, and more. The value is not only breadth but speed—large crawls finish fast, so audits don’t derail sprints.
Monitor is how you move from “periodic audits” to ongoing governance. Track multiple domains and environments in one view, set thresholds (e.g., alert if ≥100 pages flip to non-indexable), and compare crawl deltas before/after migrations or releases. It’s a live pulse on site health that catches regressions early.
Protect is the differentiator for agile orgs. Plug it into Jenkins/GitLab/GitHub Actions and run targeted SEO tests on staging. If a deploy injects a noindex on a key layout, strips analytics, or breaks canonical logic, Protect flags it during CI so the change can’t ship. Treat these like “SEO unit tests” your templates must pass.
Impact reframes technical data for business audiences: executive dashboards, industry benchmarks, and simple visuals that show the number and severity of issues, the improvement trend, and where investment will move the needle fastest. It’s tailor‑made for CMO-level conversations.
Crawling power & scalability (including JS rendering)
Lumar’s crawler is built for speed and scale. It routinely processes up to ~450 URLs per second for standard HTML and ~350 URLs per second for JavaScript-rendered pages, executing client-side scripts to fetch fully rendered content. Because all of this runs in the cloud, you aren’t limited by desktop RAM/CPU, and you can crawl millions of URLs or multiple properties in parallel without machine babysitting.
Beyond raw speed, configuration flexibility matters: crawl as mobile/desktop, throttle politely, include/exclude subdomains or patterns, and schedule recurring jobs so health stays current without human intervention. For SPA/JS sites, Lumar crawls rendered output by default so you see what search engines and users effectively see—critical for diagnosing hydration, routing, and content-injection issues.
For programmatic SEO and large catalogs, two tactics consistently pay off: (1) segmented crawls by template family to isolate regressions to a specific layout; (2) custom extraction to bubble up business-critical attributes (stock status, price, language variants) alongside indexation rules. Pair those with scheduled Monitor runs and you’ll spot thin-content bursts, duplicate titles, or pagination slips before they impact traffic.
Dashboards, reporting & stakeholder alignment
Lumar’s interface emphasizes visual storytelling: category-level summaries, color-coded severity (red/orange/green), and a “traffic funnel” view (available → indexable → unique → rankable) that turns sprawling audits into an intelligible quality narrative for non-technical partners. Trend charts, crawl comparisons (pre/post migration), and saved, segmented dashboards make it easy to tailor views (e.g., a mobile-only dashboard for product managers).
Sharing is frictionless: export CSV/PDF, create shareable links for read-only access, or automate weekly executive summaries via email—no logins required. These reporting primitives matter because they convert SEO work into organizational knowledge people will actually consume. In practice, I keep a simple Impact “Site Health Scorecard” for leadership and a deeper “Indexing Issues” view for SEO/engineering.
Tip: align your dashboard filters to how your site is built (templates, locales, product lines). When you fix something, you’ll see the delta clearly in the graphs. That creates a tight loop between effort and outcome—exactly what executives need to justify continued investment.
Integrations & data pipelines (GA, GSC, BigQuery, BI, ticketing)
Lumar’s integrations are extensive enough to become your technical SEO data backbone. Connect Google Analytics to overlay traffic and conversions on top of issues; use GSC data to reconcile crawl/index coverage gaps and discover pages that are technically crawlable yet excluded. The BigQuery connector automatically lands URL-level data into your warehouse on crawl completion, giving you SQL access for custom scoring, prioritization models, and joins with product or revenue data. From there, pipe into Looker Studio, Tableau, or Power BI for live org-wide dashboards.
On the “turn insights into action” front, push high‑priority issues into Jira, Trello, or Asana—manually or via Zapier/API—so web teams have tickets, not PDFs. Slack notifications via webhooks keep on-call teams informed when thresholds trip. If you need to go further, Lumar exposes a GraphQL API so you can build custom automations (e.g., fetch fresh issues after each crawl and enrich with business metadata before ticket creation).
The upshot: Lumar doesn’t trap your data. It plugs into the places you already work and lets you warehouse everything for long‑term analysis—an enterprise must-have once your site crosses into millions of URLs or dozens of environments.
Automation & SEO QA: from reactive audits to prevention
Traditional crawlers tell you what broke yesterday. Lumar’s Protect flips that by adding automated pre‑release tests inside CI/CD. Configure it to crawl key staging paths or templates on every build; if a change introduces, say, a rogue noindex, duplicate canonical, or blocked JS, the job fails and the issue never ships. For high‑velocity teams, this is the single most valuable capability in the platform.
Templates and rich test suites speed things up for migrations, new sections, or quarterly content pushes. On live sites, Monitor handles scheduled crawls and alerting, acting as an early‑warning system for SEO regressions or uptime‑adjacent failures (e.g., spikes in 5xx). Lumar’s newer AI workflows help prioritize and even auto-generate tasks for common issues (like missing descriptions), and webhooks/API access enable bespoke automations that fit your stack.
Bottom line: automation turns SEO from a periodic “find and fix” exercise into continuous quality assurance. That shift is what protects revenue at scale.
Pricing, plans & who should buy
Lumar prices to value and crawl volume. Expect entry tiers roughly in the ~$100–$120/month range for smaller sites, a mid-tier around ~$250/month with higher URL allowances and advanced features, and enterprise contracts tailored to millions of URLs and many projects—commonly in the five figures annually (a reported median around ~$32k/year). All plans notably include unlimited users, encouraging cross‑functional access without “seat” friction. Trials or demos are available, and pricing scales with monthly URL limits more than bolt‑on fees.
Who should buy: Enterprises, marketplaces, publishers, and global brands with multiple sites/locales that need technical governance, CI integration, and stakeholder reporting. Who might wait: Small single‑site owners under a few thousand URLs who mainly need an occasional audit—desktop tools will be more economical unless you specifically need CI/monitoring and reporting at this level.
Pros & cons (candid)
Pros: blistering crawl speed and JS rendering at enterprise scale; comprehensive platform (SEO + performance + accessibility + monitoring + reporting); Protect/CI for prevention; robust integrations/APIs/warehouse connectors; unlimited users and collaboration-first UI; strong documentation and support with high satisfaction ratings.
Cons: price is premium for small players; a learning curve given the depth; batch‑oriented crawls mean it’s not a “one‑page instant” checker; integration catalog is growing (you’ll rely on API/Zapier for some workflows); alerting needs thoughtful thresholds to avoid noise. None of these are deal‑breakers for the target customer, but they’re worth noting.
Comparison: Lumar vs Screaming Frog, Botify, and Sitebulb
Each of these tools has a fanbase and niche. Here’s the practical take for buyers deciding where to anchor enterprise technical SEO and governance.
| Capability | Lumar | Screaming Frog | Botify | Sitebulb |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scale & Speed | Cloud; ~450 URLs/s (HTML), ~350 URLs/s (JS); millions of URLs; parallel projects. | Desktop; limited by your machine; great up to tens/hundreds of thousands, slower at extreme scale. | Cloud; enterprise‑grade at massive scale; comparable high performance. | Desktop DB-backed; solid visuals; not ideal for multi‑million URL crawls on typical hardware. |
| JS Rendering | Built-in, renders by default for JS frameworks. | Available; performance tied to local resources. | Strong, paired with log insights on crawl budget. | Available; desktop constraints apply. |
| Pre‑release SEO QA | Protect integrates with CI/CD to block regressions pre‑deploy. | Scriptable headless runs; no native cloud CI module. | Focus on analysis & activation; no explicit CI module. | No CI; consultant‑style audits. |
| Accessibility & Performance | WCAG checks, Core Web Vitals via Lighthouse, quality funnel & dashboards. | Primarily SEO crawl; less governance‑wide. | Primarily SEO/logs; less emphasis on a11y. | Great visualizations; a11y not the core focus. |
| Data & Integrations | GA, GSC, BigQuery, BI tools, PM tools, GraphQL API. | Imports some analytics; manual exports; local storage. | Deep analytics, log analysis, enterprise connectors. | CSV exports; lighter integrations. |
| Collaboration & Seats | Unlimited users; web-based dashboards & links. | Per-user desktop licenses; share crawl files. | Enterprise contracts; multi-user. | Per-user desktop subscription. |
| Best for | Enterprise governance at scale (SEO + UX + a11y) with prevention. | Power users needing quick, low-cost one-off audits. | Advanced crawl/index analysis with logs for very large sites. | Practitioners who want beautiful crawl maps & guidance on modest budgets. |
In short: Botify is superb for log‑driven indexing diagnostics; Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are fantastic desktop auditors; Lumar is the all‑in‑one, cloud-first command center that folds governance, prevention, and executive reporting into everyday workflows.
30/60/90‑day rollout plan (field‑tested)
Days 1–30: Foundation
Connect GA/GSC, set up BigQuery export, define segments (by template, country, and content type), and run a baseline Analyze crawl. Build two dashboards: “Executive Quality Scorecard” and “Indexability & Canonicals.” Create alert thresholds (e.g., 50+ pages move to non‑indexable or 5xx > 1%). Start a weekly email summary to stakeholders.
Days 31–60: Prevention & prioritization
Wire up Protect in CI for your top three templates. Use custom extraction to surface schema, hreflang, and canonical targets; identify the highest‑impact fixes by overlaying GA traffic. Push top issues into Jira/Trello with owners and SLAs. Build a Core Web Vitals view and partner with engineering on performance backlog (LCP/TBT outliers).
Days 61–90: Governance at scale
Expand Monitor to secondary locales and microsites, add accessibility scans to the Quality dashboard, and introduce a monthly crawl comparison ritual (changes since last release). Publish an Impact snapshot in your exec business review so SEO health is visible next to revenue KPIs. Iterate alert thresholds to reduce noise.
Ready to try Lumar?
Start your Lumar trial here. I recommend beginning with one core template, setting CI tests in Protect, and adding GA overlays to prove impact quickly.
Conclusion
Lumar has grown from a premier crawler into a full website intelligence platform that scales audits, automates monitoring, prevents regressions in CI, and turns technical findings into business‑ready narratives. If you’re responsible for growth on a complex site, the combination of Analyze, Monitor, Protect, and Impact will save you time, de‑risk releases, and help you win executive support for technical investments. For our team, it’s the technical SEO backbone we build on—and the only solution I recommend when governance, speed, and clarity all matter at once.
FAQs
Does Lumar handle JavaScript-heavy SPAs accurately?
Yes. Lumar executes client-side scripts and crawls the rendered DOM by default, which is crucial for frameworks like React/Vue/Next. That means issues such as hydration errors, client‑side routing quirks, or content injection gaps are visible to the crawler.
How fast is the crawler on big sites?
Very fast. In standard conditions Lumar can process on the order of ~450 URLs/sec for HTML pages and ~350 URLs/sec for JS‑rendered pages—more than enough to keep pace with enterprise estates running into the millions of URLs. Because it’s cloud‑based, your local hardware isn’t a bottleneck.
Can non‑SEOs use the reports?
That’s a strength. The Impact and Quality dashboards summarize site health with color‑coded visuals, a funnel from available → indexable → unique → rankable, and plain‑language issue groupings. They are ideal for CMOs, PMs, and engineers who need clarity without jargon.
What integrations matter most on day one?
Google Analytics and Search Console for prioritization context; BigQuery for data warehousing and BI; and your ticketing stack (Jira/Trello/Asana) so issues become owned work items. Slack/webhooks help for fast incident visibility. A GraphQL API is available for deeper automation.
How does pricing compare to desktop crawlers?
Lumar is a premium cloud platform: entry tiers start around the low hundreds per month, mid‑tiers around the mid‑hundreds, and enterprise plans in the five figures annually depending on volume and modules. Desktop crawlers are far cheaper but won’t give you Lumar’s scale, monitoring, CI, or executive reporting. All Lumar plans include unlimited users.
Where does Lumar beat Botify, and where does Botify win?
Lumar’s edge is its governance breadth (a11y + performance), CI “Protect” module, and approachable reporting. Botify’s edge is deep log-file analysis and sophisticated indexing/crawl budget diagnostics. Large enterprises often pick based on whether pre‑release QA and cross‑functional governance (Lumar) or log‑centric indexing analysis (Botify) is the bigger gap.
Will Lumar replace my entire SEO stack?
It can be your technical SEO backbone, but it isn’t a keyword research/rank tracking/backlink analysis suite. Most teams pair Lumar with those capabilities elsewhere while using Lumar for crawling, monitoring, CI QA, performance/a11y governance, and reporting.