Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb for internal-link audits: which surfaces real silo leaks?

Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb for internal-link audits: which surfaces real silo leaks?

Question: when mapping internal link equity, does crawler choice change which fixes you ship?

Evidence: I ran both on the same 4,200-URL authority site. Screaming Frog's link-score (a simplified internal PageRank on a 0–100 scale) flagged 38 orphan-adjacent pages. Sitebulb's crawl maps surfaced the same orphans but added hub depth visuals that exposed a cross-silo leak Frog reported only as raw numbers. On a second 800-URL site the two tools agreed on 91% of low-link-score URLs.

Nuance: Frog wins for speed and scriptable exports at scale; Sitebulb wins for diagnosis when you can't yet see why a section is starved. The disagreement clustered on paginated and faceted URLs — exactly where config defaults differ.

Method note: two real client crawls, identical include/exclude rules, link-score vs crawl-map compared by hand.

Caveat: n=2 sites, both English, both under 5k URLs. Internal PageRank is a model, not ground truth.

Confidence: medium