What Is Lumar?
Also known as: DeepCrawl, Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl)
Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl, rebranded in 2022) is an enterprise technical SEO platform that crawls websites at scale to identify technical issues affecting search performance. It is designed for large sites with complex architectures.
Last reviewed: 26 August 2026 · Reviewed by iNet Ventures SEO Team
In plain English
Lumar is like Screaming Frog on steroids — instead of running on your desktop, it runs in the cloud and can crawl millions of pages without crashing. It finds broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, duplicate content, and hundreds of other technical issues. The key difference is that it integrates with your development pipeline, so technical SEO issues are caught before they reach production — like a CI/CD test for SEO.
Technical definition
Lumar is a cloud-based enterprise website crawler that performs deep technical SEO audits at scale. It renders JavaScript, follows complex redirect chains, analyses site architecture, and integrates with development workflows via its Automation Hub. The platform supports scheduled crawls, API access, and custom extraction rules. It is designed for enterprise sites with millions of URLs where desktop crawlers are insufficient. Formerly known as DeepCrawl, the company rebranded to Lumar in 2022.
Quick example
An e-commerce site with 2 million URLs runs Lumar weekly. The crawl detects that a recent code deployment introduced 15,000 new 404 errors by changing URL structures without redirects. The Automation Hub sends an alert to the engineering team via Slack, and the issue is fixed within hours — before Googlebot crawls the broken URLs and wastes crawl budget.
Quick facts
| Meaning | An enterprise cloud-based website crawler for technical SEO at scale |
|---|---|
| Main category | Technical SEO tools |
| Used by | Enterprise SEO teams, large e-commerce sites, global brands with complex architectures |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Importance | High |
| Common examples | Large-scale site audits, JavaScript rendering, CI/CD integration, scheduled crawls, site architecture analysis |
| Still relevant? | Yes. Lumar is the leading enterprise-tier website crawler, used by brands including eBay, Microsoft, and Adobe. It is significantly more expensive than desktop crawlers like Screaming Frog, but for sites with millions of URLs, desktop tools are not viable. The CI/CD integration via Automation Hub is a genuine differentiator. |
Why Lumar matters
Lumar matters because technical SEO at enterprise scale is fundamentally different from small-site auditing. When you have millions of URLs, desktop crawlers run out of memory, crawl times extend to days, and the volume of issues becomes unmanageable without prioritisation.
Cloud crawling removes hardware limitations
Desktop crawlers like Screaming Frog are limited by your computer's RAM and network. Lumar runs in the cloud, meaning it can crawl millions of URLs without hardware constraints. For enterprise sites, this is not a luxury — it is a requirement.
Automation Hub integrates SEO into development
The Automation Hub connects crawl data to CI/CD pipelines, meaning technical SEO issues are detected when code is deployed, not when rankings drop. This shifts SEO left in the development process, preventing issues rather than fixing them.
Issue prioritisation cuts through volume
A crawl of 2 million URLs might surface 50,000 issues. Lumar prioritises by traffic impact, template frequency, and severity — so the team fixes the 200 issues that matter rather than drowning in 50,000 rows of data.
JavaScript rendering matches Googlebot
Modern enterprise sites rely heavily on JavaScript frameworks. Lumar's rendering engine executes JavaScript and captures the rendered DOM, so it sees what Googlebot sees — not just the raw HTML source.
Scheduled crawls provide trend data
Weekly or daily scheduled crawls let you track technical SEO health over time. This trend data is invaluable for diagnosing when issues were introduced and proving that fixes have been effective.
How it works
Lumar crawls websites from the cloud, extracts technical signals, and integrates with development workflows.
- 1
Crawl configuration is set up
You configure the starting URL, crawl limits, exclusion patterns, user-agent, rendering mode, and custom extraction rules. For enterprise sites, configuration is critical — crawling everything on a 5M-URL site without exclusions produces unmanageable data volume.
- 2
The cloud crawler fetches and renders pages
Lumar's cloud infrastructure fetches each URL, records response codes and headers, and — if rendering is enabled — executes JavaScript using a headless browser to capture the rendered DOM. This is what allows it to see content that only appears after JavaScript execution.
- 3
Technical signals are extracted
From each page, Lumar extracts on-page elements (titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonicals), response codes, redirect chains, internal linking structure, structured data, Core Web Vitals signals, and hundreds of other technical SEO checks.
- 4
Issues are categorised and prioritised
The platform categorises issues by type (crawlability, indexation, content, links, performance) and prioritises by severity and traffic impact. This prioritisation is what makes the difference between a usable audit and an unmanageable data dump.
- 5
Automation Hub routes issues to development
The Automation Hub integrates with Jira, Slack, GitHub, and CI/CD systems. When a crawl detects new issues, alerts are routed to the appropriate development team — often before the code reaches production, if integrated with staging environment crawls.
Types and variations
The platform is organised around its core modules.
Crawl
The core crawling engine. Configurable for site size, rendering mode, and custom extraction. Supports millions of URLs per crawl with cloud infrastructure.
Automation Hub
Integrates crawl data with development workflows. Connects to Jira, Slack, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines. This is Lumar's primary differentiator versus desktop crawlers.
Insights
Dashboards that summarise crawl findings by category, severity, and trend over time. Designed for reporting to both SEO and engineering teams.
Benchmark
Compares your site's technical SEO health against industry benchmarks and competitors. Useful for executive reporting and competitive analysis.
Page Grouping
Groups URLs by template type (product pages, category pages, blog posts) so issues can be diagnosed at the template level rather than page by page. Critical for large sites where fixing a template fixes thousands of pages at once.
Real examples
How enterprise teams use Lumar in practice.
Catching a deployment regression before production
Lumar is configured to crawl the staging environment after every code deployment. A new release changes the product page template, accidentally removing canonical tags from 50,000 product pages. The Automation Hub detects the missing canonicals, alerts the engineering team via Slack, and the fix is deployed before the code reaches production. Without Lumar, this would have caused duplicate content issues across the entire product catalogue.
Diagnosing a traffic drop with historical crawl data
An enterprise site loses 20% of organic traffic over two weeks. The SEO team compares the current Lumar crawl against the previous month's crawl. The comparison reveals that 30,000 new redirect chains were introduced by a URL structure change. The team maps the redirects to direct URLs, traffic recovers within a week.
Running one crawl and ignoring trend data
An enterprise team runs a single Lumar crawl, exports the issues list, and hands it to engineering. They never run another crawl. Three months later, traffic drops and they have no baseline to compare against. Scheduled crawls are what make Lumar valuable — a single crawl is just an expensive one-off audit.
Crawling everything without exclusion patterns
A site with 5 million URLs is crawled with no exclusions. The crawl takes 48 hours, produces 200,000 issues, and the team is overwhelmed. Proper configuration — excluding parameter URLs, faceted navigation, and duplicate paths — would reduce the crawl to 800,000 meaningful URLs and 5,000 prioritised issues.
Best practices
Lumar is a significant investment. These habits ensure you get value proportional to the cost.
What to do
- Configure crawl exclusions carefully — crawling everything on a large site produces unmanageable data
- Set up scheduled crawls (weekly minimum) to build trend data — single crawls waste the platform's value
- Integrate the Automation Hub with your CI/CD pipeline to catch issues before production
- Use page grouping to diagnose issues at the template level, not page by page
- Route alerts to the right team — engineering for code issues, content for metadata issues
- Compare crawls over time rather than analysing each crawl in isolation
What to avoid
- Running a single crawl and treating it as a one-off audit — Lumar is a monitoring platform
- Crawling without exclusion patterns on large sites — you will drown in data
- Ignoring the Automation Hub — it is the primary differentiator and justifies the price
- Using Lumar for small sites — Screaming Frog at £199/year is more appropriate for sites under 100K URLs
- Reporting raw issue counts to executives — use trend data and prioritised summaries instead
Common mistakes
Not configuring crawl exclusions
Enterprise sites have parameter URLs, faceted navigation, and duplicate paths that inflate crawl size without adding insight. Without exclusions, a 5M-URL site produces 200,000+ issues that nobody can action. Configure exclusions during implementation, not after the first overwhelming crawl.
Treating Lumar as a one-off audit tool
The platform's value comes from trend data — comparing crawls over time to detect regressions and verify fixes. A single crawl is an expensive snapshot. Schedule regular crawls and use the comparison feature to track progress.
Not integrating with development workflows
The Automation Hub is Lumar's key differentiator. Without it, Lumar is just an expensive cloud crawler. With it, technical SEO becomes part of the development process rather than an afterthought.
Using Lumar for small sites
For sites under 100,000 URLs, Screaming Frog at £199/year provides comparable functionality. Lumar's value is in scale (millions of URLs) and integration (Automation Hub). Using it for small sites is overkill.
Lumar in the technical SEO tool landscape
Lumar occupies the enterprise tier of website crawling. Below it sits Screaming Frog (£199/year, desktop) and Sitebulb (~£13.50–£29.50/month, desktop) — both excellent tools that are sufficient for most sites. Lumar is necessary when site scale exceeds desktop capabilities (millions of URLs) or when CI/CD integration is required. The rebrand from DeepCrawl in 2022 signalled a broadening of scope beyond crawling toward a full technical SEO health platform. The main criticism is pricing opacity — like most enterprise tools, costs are negotiated privately and can be substantial.
- Enterprise-tier crawler — necessary for sites with millions of URLs
- Automation Hub (CI/CD integration) is the primary differentiator
- Formerly DeepCrawl — rebranded in 2022 to signal broader scope
- Used by eBay, Microsoft, Adobe, and other enterprise brands
- Pricing is enterprise-level and not publicly listed
- For sites under 100K URLs, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb are more cost-effective
How iNet Ventures approaches lumar
We use Screaming Frog for most client audits — it handles sites up to hundreds of thousands of URLs effectively at £199/year. For enterprise clients with millions of URLs or CI/CD requirements, we recommend Lumar. The Automation Hub is genuinely transformative for teams that can integrate it into their development workflow — it shifts SEO from reactive to preventive.
Enterprise technical SEO audits
For enterprise clients, we configure Lumar with appropriate exclusions, set up scheduled crawls, and build comparison reports that track technical SEO health over time. The first crawl establishes a baseline; subsequent crawls measure progress.
Development workflow integration
We help enterprise clients connect Lumar's Automation Hub to their CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that code deployments are checked for SEO regressions before they reach production. This is where the platform delivers its highest ROI.
Continue learning
SE Ranking vs Lumar Comparison
How an all-in-one SEO platform compares to an enterprise technical crawler.
Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog Comparison
Comparing the two leading desktop SEO crawlers.
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Frequently asked questions
How much does Lumar cost?
Lumar pricing is not publicly listed. It is an enterprise platform with custom pricing based on crawl volume, number of projects, and modules required. Annual costs typically range from tens of thousands to six figures for large enterprises. Contact their sales team for a quote tailored to your site size and requirements.
Is Lumar the same as DeepCrawl?
Yes. DeepCrawl rebranded to Lumar in 2022. The platform and its core crawling technology remain the same, but the rebrand signalled a broadening of scope from pure crawling to a broader technical SEO health platform. If you see references to DeepCrawl in older articles, they refer to the same product.
Lumar vs Screaming Frog — which should I use?
For sites under 100,000 URLs, Screaming Frog at £199/year is sufficient and far more cost-effective. For sites with millions of URLs, or when you need CI/CD integration via the Automation Hub, Lumar is the better choice. Many enterprise teams use both — Screaming Frog for quick ad-hoc crawls and Lumar for scheduled, large-scale monitoring.
Does Lumar render JavaScript?
Yes. Lumar can render JavaScript using a headless browser, capturing the rendered DOM just as Googlebot does. This is essential for modern sites built with React, Vue, Angular, or other JavaScript frameworks where content only appears after JavaScript execution.
What is the Lumar Automation Hub?
The Automation Hub is Lumar's integration layer that connects crawl data to development workflows. It integrates with Jira, Slack, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines, allowing technical SEO issues to be detected and routed to engineering teams automatically — often before code reaches production. This is Lumar's primary differentiator versus desktop crawlers.
Written from research into the platform's public documentation, feature descriptions, and market positioning. The DeepCrawl to Lumar rebrand was confirmed via public sources. Pricing is not publicly available and is described in general terms. Feature comparisons with Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are based on hands-on experience with those tools.
- Written by:
- iNet Ventures Editorial Team
- Reviewed by:
- iNet Ventures SEO Team
- Published:
- 26 August 2026
- Last reviewed:
- 26 August 2026
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