Sprout SEO Extension is free, has no account, and no sign-in. Most of what it does happens entirely inside your browser. A few features cannot, and this page says precisely which.
What Never Leaves Your Browser
Everything the extension reads off the page you are on is analysed locally and stays there:
- Page title, meta description, canonical, robots directives, headings, word count
- Links, anchor text and rel attributes
- Images and their attributes
- Structured data
- Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata
- Rendered source and the raw-versus-rendered diff
Your AI Insights captures stay local too. Extracting a ChatGPT conversation talks to ChatGPT’s own backend using the session you are already signed in with. Gemini and Google AI Overview capture read data the page itself received. None of it is sent to a Sprout server, and none of it is used for anything other than displaying it back to you. Your captures, projects and brand lists live in your browser’s extension storage on your own machine.
There is no analytics SDK in the extension. No Google Analytics, no Segment, no Mixpanel, no Sentry, no session recording.
What Does Leave Your Browser
A few features need a lookup the browser cannot do on its own. They send a URL or a keyword to a Sprout service at api.sproutseo.io:
| Feature | What is sent |
|---|---|
| Keyword ideas and the search-box volume badge | The search query, plus the country and language you selected |
| Core Web Vitals, in the popup and per SERP result | The page URL or origin, to look up Chrome UX Report data |
| Link status codes in the Links tab | The link URLs being checked |
| Robots.txt checks for link blocking | The domains whose robots.txt is being read |
| Redirect chain in the HTTP Headers tab | The page URL being traced |
These are page and link URLs. No page content, no form data, no cookies, no credentials.
Up to and including version 4.5 these calls went to api.usergrowth.io, which runs the same service. They are consolidating onto api.sproutseo.io in the next release.
Some features also talk directly to third parties, without Sprout in the middle: Google Trends for the trends charts, Google Maps for the location autocomplete in the local search simulator, the Wayback Machine for the archive fetcher, and Reddit for the share detector.
The “open in another tool” buttons and the right-click external lookups just open a URL in a new tab. Nothing is sent anywhere until you click one, and then it goes to that tool, not to us.
Install and Uninstall Counts
On install, the extension sends a one-time ping to api.sproutseo.io containing a randomly generated install identifier and which store you installed from. On uninstall, the browser opens a feedback page with the same identifier.
That identifier is a random value generated on your machine. It is not derived from your name, your email, your IP or anything about you, and it is not linked to any browsing data. It exists so we can count installs and uninstalls.
Firefox is excluded from this entirely. No install ping, no identifier, no uninstall call. That is deliberate, so the extension’s “collects no data” declaration on Firefox Add-ons is accurate.
Permissions
The extension requests broad host access (http://*/* and https://*/*) because it is an SEO tool: it has to be able to analyse whatever page you are on, and you should not have to grant permission per site. It reads pages, it does not transmit them. See Permissions Explained for what each individual permission is for.
Your Data, Your Control
- Delete a single conversation from the History panel in AI Insights.
- Delete everything with Clear all data on the Bulk Analysis page.
- Export everything with Backup (JSON) before you clear, if you want a copy.
- Uninstalling removes all locally stored data with the extension.
Questions
If something here is unclear, or you want detail on a specific request the extension makes, contact support. Network requests are inspectable in your browser’s own DevTools if you want to verify any of this yourself, which is the right instinct.