Sprout SEO Extension is a free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It combines multiple tools for on-page SEO checks, SERP enhancements, and AI search analysis—and can easily replace three to five other extensions you may be using now.
Here’s how our extension can help you:
1. Check the most important on-page SEO data
Analyze the on-page SEO elements of any page and find potential issues. The Page Info tab has several sections:
The “General Info” section covers:
- Title tag with character count and truncation warning
- Meta description with character count
- URL and canonical URL with match/mismatch badge
- Robots directives from meta tags, x-robots-tag, and robots.txt
The “Web Vitals” section shows:
- Core Web Vitals from CrUX field data (LCP, INP, CLS)
- Falls back to origin summary when page-level data isn’t available
This is especially useful for quick performance checks without opening PageSpeed Insights.
The “Content Metrics” section contains:
- Word count for thin content detection
- Heading inventory (H1–H6 counts)
- Full heading list with hierarchy visualization
The “Additional Checks” section covers:
- Hreflang presence with language/region codes
- Sitemap detection
- Schema presence indicator
You can Export Page Copy or Copy Headings to clipboard for content audits. There’s also a direct link to view the live robots.txt file.
Use Page Info for quick indexability checks before publishing, content audit triage, or debugging canonical and robots conflicts.
2. Identify various types of links on pages
Sprout SEO Extension makes it easy to identify different links on a page through the Links tab:
- Internal and external links (separated)
- Nofollow, UGC, and sponsored links
- Broken and redirecting links (click “Check Status” to fetch)
The tab lists all links on the page—including JS-generated links—with filters for query strings, blocked-by-robots, redirects, and error codes.
The “Highlight” feature is particularly useful. Click it to overlay color-coded badges directly on the page:
- Yellow = query strings
- Orange = nofollow
- Red = blocked by robots
- Blue = redirects
- Error colors for 4xx/5xx
This lets you visually scan link health without scrolling through tables. Great for catching mis-wired navigation or spotting external links that should have rel=”nofollow”.
Export the full link table as CSV for audits, or click any row to open the destination in a new tab.
3. Find missing alt text and oversized images
The Images tab surfaces image SEO issues fast.
You’ll see summary counts for:
- Total images on the page
- Images without alt text
- Images without title text
- Images without explicit dimensions
Each filter lets you drill down to just the problem images. The per-image detail pane shows alt text (or “Missing”), title, dimensions, file size, and the full URL.
Export options make this actionable. You can export:
- All images
- Only images without alt text
- Only images without title text
- Only images without dimensions
Use the Images tab for accessibility audits (prioritizing missing-alt fixes), performance checks (finding oversized assets), or CMS QA (verifying lazy-loaded images rendered correctly).
4. Validate structured data with one click
The Schema tab detects JSON-LD and Microdata on the current page.
Detected schema types appear with counts and emoji labels for quick scanning:
- Article 📰
- Product 🛍️
- FAQPage 🤔
- BreadcrumbList 🍞
- Event 🎉
- Recipe 🍳
- VideoObject 🎥
- LocalBusiness 🏪
- JobPosting 💼
- Review ⭐️
- WebSite 🌐
- WebPage 📄
Unknown or unsupported types are flagged so you know what needs attention. You can expand raw JSON-LD snippets to inspect the markup directly.
One-click validation is the killer feature here. Buttons let you:
- Open Google Rich Results Test with the current URL
- Open schema.org Validator with the current URL
- Export or copy the schema payload
Use this for pre-publish validation loops (test → fix → reload → retest), confirming all expected types render, or debugging why rich results aren’t showing.
5. Trace redirect paths and read HTTP headers easily
See if you reached the destination page via a redirect and trace the entire redirect chain—including any intermediate hops.
The HTTP Headers tab shows:
- Status code (color-coded: green for 2xx, blue for 3xx, red for 4xx/5xx)
- Scheme (HTTP/HTTPS with a lock icon)
- Full redirect chain with each hop’s status and destination
For your own website, you can check if redirects were implemented properly and whether the right method was used (301 vs 302).
This tool also displays the complete HTTP response headers, which can be challenging to access for casual browser users. Headers you’ll find include:
- server, content-type, content-length
- cache-control, expires, vary
- x-robots-tag (critical for indexability—and you won’t find this in page source!)
- x-frame-options, content-security-policy, referrer-policy
There’s also a built-in status code reference table explaining common codes like 200, 301, 302, 404, and 503.
Use HTTP Headers when debugging indexability issues (reconciling x-robots-tag vs. meta robots), verifying caching before performance tests, or auditing security headers.
6. Preview social sharing tags
The Social tab validates Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata before your content goes live.
Facebook / LinkedIn Preview shows:
- og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type
- A placeholder card appears if tags are missing
X (Twitter) Preview shows:
- twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image, twitter:card
- Placeholder card if tags are missing
Reddit Detection is a unique feature. The extension checks if the URL was ever shared on Reddit. If shared, you’ll see the score, comments, subreddit, age, and a direct link to the thread. If not shared, there’s a quick “share it now” link.
Use Social for pre-campaign checks (verifying image dimensions before scheduling posts), duplicate tag cleanup, or monitoring whether your content gained Reddit traction.
7. Capture AI search insights
The AI Insights tab extracts data from AI-powered search platforms—a feature you won’t find in most SEO extensions.
Supported platforms:
| Platform | What’s Captured |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Fan-out queries, sources, sourcing pipelines, products and merchant offers, carousels, entities, reasoning, model type |
| Gemini | Fan-out queries and source attributions |
| Google AI Overviews | The Overview answer and its citations |
ChatGPT is by far the deepest of the three. On a ChatGPT conversation you get:
- Original input prompt: what you asked.
- Fan-out queries: the searches ChatGPT actually ran behind your prompt, typed by route so you can tell a web search from a shopping or image lookup.
- Sourcing pipelines: which retrieval path each source arrived through. Bright Data, Oxylabs, Labrador (licensed content), or the open web. See Sourcing Pipelines.
- Sources: categorised as citation, news, image, academia, product, hidden, or other.
- Products: merchant offers, price, rating, review count, and position in the carousel.
- Carousels and entities: images, news, places, and the named entities in the answer.
- Reasoning: thinking duration, effort level, and step titles, when the model exposes them.
- Model: the model slug, and whether the answer was a Thinking or an Instant response.
Every section exports to CSV on its own. Conversations are cached, so History reopens past sessions without re-extracting, and you can filter it by platform, model, or project and search across the lot.
Two things that turn this from a lookup into a workflow:
- Projects group conversations by client or campaign, so a month of research stays sorted. See Projects.
- Bulk analysis opens a full dashboard that runs an entire prompt list through ChatGPT unattended, then rolls every capture into one view: top domains and URLs, a fan-out tag cloud, sourcing-pipeline split, products, entities, and brand versus competitor share of voice. See Bulk Analysis Dashboard and Bulk Prompt Analysis.
Where Google AI Overview capture works. It runs on 17 Google country domains: google.com, .co.uk, .nl, .de, .fr, .es, .it, .ca, .com.au, .co.jp, .com.br, .co.in, .be, .pl, .se, .at and .ch. On any other Google domain the tab will not pick up an Overview. This is being widened to every Google country domain in the next release.
Use AI Insights to track which sources AI models cite for a topic, research what queries AI uses behind the scenes, build citation lists for fact-checking, or monitor AI Overview presence on your target SERPs.
8. Launch third-party SEO tools instantly
The Other Tools tab is a launchpad for external SEO platforms. One click opens the current page or domain in:
| Tool | What Opens |
|---|---|
| Search Console | Page in GSC |
| Google Site Search | site:domain.com query |
| PageSpeed Insights | Page analysis |
| Google AMP Test | AMP validation |
| SimilarWeb | Domain traffic |
| Wayback Machine | Page/domain archive |
| W3C Validator | HTML validation |
| BuiltWith | Tech stack |
| Whois | Domain registration |
| Ahrefs | Performance / Backlinks |
| SE Ranking | Performance / Backlinks |
| BuzzSumo | Content analysis |
| Majestic | Backlink profile |
| Moz | Link Explorer |
| Semrush | Performance / Backlinks |
| Sistrix | Page / Domain visibility |
Bonus: Bulk data tools
Download Data from Archive.org — Had a bad migration? Fetch up to 100,000 URLs from Wayback Machine. Set a date range, exclude file extensions (images, CSS, JS), and keep URLs with parameters as separate entries. Perfect for migration recovery or historical content audits.
Find Bulk Google Trends Data — Paste keywords (one per line), select region and time range, and export trends with visuals. Great for seasonality analysis and content planning.
9. Check search rankings in other countries
Whether you run a multiregional website or do international SEO, you’ll need to check search results in different countries.
Sprout SEO Extension’s SERP Enhancements make this easy.
Turn the widgets on first. SERP enhancements ship switched off, so a fresh install shows nothing on Google until you enable them. Run any Google search, find the Sprout panel in the right-hand column, and flip the switch in its header. The setting sticks, so this is a one-time step. Flip it back off whenever you want a clean SERP.
They appear on standard Google results only. Images, Video, Shopping, News and Books results are excluded.
Once enabled you get:
Search Trends
- Interest over time chart for the query
- Geo and time-range selectors
Keyword Ideas
- Paginated table of related keywords
- Export all or per-page
- A compact volume and CPC badge next to the Google search box for the query you just ran. If the keyword API has no data for your chosen country it falls back to US figures and tells you so in a tooltip, rather than showing you a blank.
Core Web Vitals per Result
- LCP, CLS, INP for each ranking page
- Correlation analysis showing CWV vs. ranking position
- Click any result’s score to open a detail modal with the full CrUX histograms
Local Search Simulator
- Set a location, by address with autocomplete or by lat/long coordinates
- Set the interface language
- Set the device (Desktop, Android, iPad, iPhone)
Select your settings and click “Enable Search Override” to reload results. No VPN required. Use Reset to clear the override.
One browser caveat: the location override works on Chrome and Edge. Firefox does not expose the request-header API it depends on, so on Firefox the language and device overrides still apply but the location one has no effect.
People Also Ask Extractor
- Choose depth (2–8 levels)
- Download CSV of the full PAA tree
The extractor only appears when the current SERP actually has a People Also Ask block.
This is perfect for content brief kickoffs (pull PAA + trends for outline and FAQ), local SERP previews, or exporting keyword ideas for paid/organic planning.
10. Use the right-click context menu for quick actions
Right-click any page → Sprout SEO Extension for keyboard-free shortcuts.
| Block | Actions |
|---|---|
| Validators | Rich Results Test, Schema.org Validator |
| JS & Source | Toggle JavaScript, View Rendered Source |
| Link Tools | Highlight Internal, Highlight External, site: search, -inurl: search |
| Markdown | Copy Page as Markdown, or Download Page as Markdown as a .md file |
| Speed Tests | WebPageTest, GTMetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse |
| SERP Helpers | Remove breadcrumbs, Show position numbers |
| External Lookups | Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Archive.org, BuzzSumo, Majestic, Moz, Semrush, SimilarWeb, Sistrix |
The JavaScript toggle is particularly useful for cloaking tests—disable JS, view the rendered source, re-enable, and compare what Googlebot sees vs. users.
Toggle JavaScript on the current tab with a keyboard shortcut. The default is Alt+Shift+J, and you can rebind it on your browser’s extension shortcuts page.
Full Context Menu Documentation →
11. Automatically switch between light and dark themes
Whatever system preferences you have set, we automatically follow your light and dark mode preferences. There is nothing to configure.
Supported browsers
| Browser | Support |
|---|---|
| Chrome | Full |
| Edge | Full |
| Firefox | Full |
The interface follows your browser language and ships in seven: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
Tips for power users
- Pin the extension so you always see the icon and can click it instantly.
- Use SERP widgets sparingly — toggle off when you just want to browse.
- Combine tools — open PageSpeed + WebPageTest in parallel for lab + field views.
- Export early — grab link/image/schema exports before making changes so you have a baseline.
- Check redirects before linking — use HTTP Headers to confirm destinations before adding internal links.
Get help
- Install and Supported Browsers
- Troubleshooting
- Data and Privacy
- Permissions Explained
- Feature Documentation
- Changelog
- Contact Support
That’s everything Sprout SEO Extension can do. Install it, pin it, and start auditing!
Frequently Asked Questions
Sprout SEO Extension: Common Questions
Why is the right-click menu missing?
Reload the extension from your browser’s extensions page. The context menu is rebuilt when the extension installs and when the browser starts, so a reload restores it.
Also check where you are right-clicking. The menu is registered for the page itself, so it does not appear when you right-click a link, an image, or selected text. Right-click blank page area.
What data does the extension send off my machine?
Almost nothing. Everything read off the page you are on, titles, meta tags, headings, links, images and structured data, is analysed locally and stays there. Your AI Insights captures also stay on your machine.
A few features need a lookup the browser cannot do alone, and those send a URL or a keyword to a Sprout service: keyword volume and CPC, Core Web Vitals, link status codes, robots.txt checks, and the redirect chain. Those are URLs and queries only. No page content, no form data, no cookies, no credentials.
There is no analytics SDK in the extension. On install it sends a one-time ping with a random identifier so installs can be counted, and Firefox is excluded from even that.
Is Sprout SEO Extension free, and do I need an account?
It is free, and there is no account, no sign-in and no licence key. Install it from your browser’s extension store and it works.
Which browsers does Sprout SEO Extension support?
Chrome, Firefox and Edge.
Almost everything works identically across all three. The one exception is the local search simulator’s location override, which works on Chrome and Edge. It relies on rewriting a request header and Firefox does not expose the API that needs, so on Firefox the language and device overrides still apply but the location one has no effect.
Why don’t I see anything on Google search results?
SERP enhancements ship switched off. They will not appear until you enable them once.
Run any Google search, find the Sprout panel in the right-hand column, and flip the switch in its header. The setting is remembered, so this is a one-time step.
If the switch is already on, check the result type. The widgets appear on standard Google results only. Images, Video, Shopping, News and Books results are excluded.