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Getting Started 4 min read

Installing Crawl Cove on macOS

The Mac build is signed and notarised with Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper block. From .dmg to a running Agency Dashboard in five minutes.

Crawl Cove ships as a standard macOS disk image, built natively for the SEO crawler for Mac. There is no account to create, nothing to sync, and no cloud setup step. You open the .dmg, drag the app to Applications, and land on the Agency Dashboard. This guide walks the whole path and explains exactly what the app writes to your Mac on first run.

Note

What you'll need: the Crawl Cove .dmg for your processor, a Mac running macOS 11 Big Sur or later, and about 5 minutes. No API keys or internet account are required to install. Those come later, only for the optional integrations.

1. Pick the right disk image

Crawl Cove is built separately for the two Mac processor families, and your dashboard offers both:

  • Crawl-Cove-<version>-arm64.dmg for Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M2, M3, M4 and later).
  • Crawl-Cove-<version>-x64.dmg for Intel Macs.

If you are not sure which you have, open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. A Chip line naming an M-series processor means Apple Silicon; a Processor line naming an Intel Core chip means Intel.

Picking the wrong one is not dangerous, it simply will not run, so you can just download the other and try again.

2. Open the disk image and drag to Applications

  1. Double-click the downloaded .dmg. A window opens showing the Crawl Cove icon beside an Applications shortcut.
  2. Drag Crawl Cove onto Applications.
  3. Eject the disk image, then launch Crawl Cove from Applications or Launchpad.

Tip

There is no Gatekeeper block to work around. The macOS build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple, so you will not see the "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" message that unsigned apps produce. macOS may still ask you to confirm once that you meant to open an application downloaded from the internet. Click Open and that is the last you will see of it.

Windows is equally smooth from version 1.0.0: that installer is code-signed with a Microsoft-verified certificate issued to Crawl Cove, so Windows names the publisher instead of warning about an unrecognised app.

3. First launch and the self-check

On launch, Crawl Cove runs a backend self-check before showing you anything. If the local database opens cleanly, the app drops you straight onto the Agency Dashboard, the global landing page that triages every client you manage.

If the database fails to open, you get an honest error screen that names the problem, not a dead blank window. The app is designed to degrade visibly: a failure tells you what went wrong rather than hiding it.

A healthy first launch leaves you on the Agency Dashboard with no clients yet. That's your cue to add your first one.

What the app writes to your Mac

This is where local-first stops being a slogan and becomes a file path. On first run Crawl Cove creates two things in your user-data folder, which on macOS lives under your home Library folder:

  • A local database at <userData>/crawlcove.db. Every client, crawl, finding, and keyword you ever record lives here, in SQLite, on your own disk.
  • An encrypted secrets folder at <userData>/secrets/. OAuth tokens and API keys are written here via the operating system's secure storage, which on macOS means the system Keychain, and never into the database. A credential is only ever presented to the provider that issued it, which is what makes the integration work; none of them is ever sent to us.

Note

You never have to guess the path. Crawl Cove prints the exact location it is using under Settings → Data & Storage, so you can copy it straight into Finder or a backup tool.

Tip

Nothing phones home. There is no SaaS backend behind Crawl Cove, so your clients' data and access tokens are never uploaded to us. For agencies handling sites under NDA, "the data is on my machine, the secrets are encrypted, and nothing goes to the vendor" is an answer you can give a client with a straight face.

The one exception is the one you choose. An integration you switch on talks to your own Google, Bing or AI provider account, on your own credentials, and that traffic goes straight there rather than through us.

That separation matters: the database holds your work, the secrets folder holds your credentials, and the two are kept apart by design. When you later back up your data, the database snapshot deliberately excludes the secrets folder. Credentials never leave secure storage.

Updates

Crawl Cove updates itself on macOS. The app checks for a new version, downloads it in the background, and swaps it in when you next quit, so you do not need to return to the site and re-run this guide for every release. Your licence key, your device registration and every audit you have run survive the update.

You're installed: what next?

With the Agency Dashboard open, you have a working, private SEO audit app. The next two steps get you to your first real findings:

Next

  1. A tour of the interface: agency vs client: learn the two navigation levels before you dive in.
  2. Adding your first client: the five-minute onboarding wizard.

Put this guide into practice

Crawl Cove runs these audits on your machine. Try the SEO Crawler for Mac or compare the plans.

Download Crawl Cove

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