Detailed SEO Extension: on-page SEO data one click away
A browser extension used by 600,000 SEOs that surfaces titles, meta descriptions, robots directives, headings, schema and canonicals, maintained through to its acquisition by Ahrefs.
The product problem
SEOs check the same on-page signals all day: title, meta description, robots directives, headings, schema and canonical. In a browser those signals sit in view-source or in response headers, which is slow to read across many pages and easy to misread. The extension, built with Detailed in Newcastle, pulls them together and puts them one click away on whatever page is open, so an audit starts from the page itself.
The delivered scope
The extension is built with Vue and JavaScript on the Chrome Extension API, with separate Chrome and Firefox manifests. A content script reads the page, including canonicals, hreflang, headings, schema, links and images, while a background script captures X-Robots-Tag headers. The popup presents the results and exports image and link data. A Google search script can extract People Also Ask questions to a CSV file. It is now published by Ahrefs, who acquired it.
Maintenance at scale is about not breaking things
At 600,000 installs, the extension runs on every site its users visit. Real pages contain malformed markup, missing tags, duplicate canonicals and unusual headers, so a parsing edge case becomes a support incident at scale. Maintenance is mostly about not breaking anything. For a similar extension, parsing should be defensive by default, permissions kept narrow, and each release checked against awkward real-world pages before it ships.
What shipped
A widely used SEO browser extension that surfaces on-page signals in one click, now published by Ahrefs.
Visit the project ↗