How to uninstall Screaming Frog on a Mac

How do I completely uninstall Screaming Frog on a Mac?

Export any crawls you want to keep from inside the app, while it is still installed.
Quit Screaming Frog SEO Spider and move it from Applications to the Trash.
Move ~/.ScreamingFrogSEOSpider to the Trash. In Finder press ⌘ ⇧ G and paste the path.
If you connected AI or analytics accounts, revoke those keys or connections at the provider.

What is in ~/.ScreamingFrogSEOSpider?

Item	Size here	What it is
`chrome`	799 MB	A bundled Chrome for JavaScript rendering
`node`	370 MB	A bundled Node runtime
`javafx`	105 MB	The interface libraries
`ProjectInstanceData`	4 KB here	Saved crawls when database storage mode is on
`prefs`, `analytics`, AI config files	under 1 MB	Settings, connected accounts, AI integration settings

18,412 files in all. On our Mac Screaming Frog was no longer in Applications, and the whole folder was still there.

Will deleting it lose my crawls?

Only crawls saved in database storage mode, which live in ProjectInstanceData. Here it was empty. Crawls you saved as .seospider files are wherever you saved them. In database mode a large site's crawl can run to gigabytes, so on an active install this is often the biggest folder.

Find what is left in one look

Free Mac shows ~/.ScreamingFrogSEOSpider as a 1.2 GB block with its bundled browser inside, and moves what you pick to the Trash. More hidden folders in dot folders taking up space and bundled browsers in Playwright browsers.

Related: uninstall Pandoc and uninstall Watchman.

Measured on 17 October 2026 on a MacBook Air (M1, 8 GB) running macOS 27.0.1, read only: du -sh on ~/.ScreamingFrogSEOSpider and its subfolders, a file count, ls of its contents (names only), and a Spotlight search for the app. Nothing was removed.

Common questions

What is the .ScreamingFrogSEOSpider folder?

Screaming Frog's data folder: a bundled Chrome, Node and JavaFX, settings, and crawls saved in database mode. It was 1.2 GB on our Mac.

Is it safe to delete .ScreamingFrogSEOSpider?

Yes, once the app is removed. Export any database mode crawls first; crawls you saved as files are elsewhere.

Why is Screaming Frog using so much disk space?

It bundles its own Chrome (799 MB on our Mac) for rendering JavaScript, and database storage mode keeps every crawl on disk.