A free on-page SEO check, in one click.

We built it because we wanted one. The free SEO extensions either nag you with pop-up tabs, ask to read every site you visit, or stop at listing what is on the page without saying whether it is right. This one judges. It runs on the tab you click it on and on nothing else, and it has no server to phone home to.

What it checks

• Title and meta description. Length in characters and in pixels, the way Google actually cuts them. Duplicates, placeholders, a description that repeats the title.
• Headings. One H1, no skipped levels, nothing hidden, and the whole outline drawn as a tree.
• Images. Missing alt text, placeholder alt text, missing width and height (that is layout shift), a lazy-loaded hero.
• Canonical. Missing, relative, pointing somewhere else, or http on an https page.
• Indexability. The robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header most tools never read, and robots.txt for the exact URL you are on. A noindex page gets a banner across the top of the report so it cannot be missed.
• Structured data. Every JSON-LD block parsed and every node checked for the properties Google requires and recommends for its rich result: Article, Product, LocalBusiness, FAQ, Breadcrumb, Event, Recipe, Video, JobPosting, Review, Organization, WebSite and more. It catches references to an @id that is not on the page, dates that are not ISO 8601, and relative URLs.
• Open Graph and X cards. Every tag with what it falls back to, and a mockup of the card on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Slack and Discord with the real image loaded and measured against 1200 by 630.
• The Google result. A preview on desktop and mobile with the title and description editable, so you can try a rewrite and watch the width meter before you touch the site.

What the score means

Four modules, each out of 100: Basics (title, description, canonical, indexability), Structure (headings, images, text, links), Schema and Social. A fail costs its full weight and a warning half of it, and the four combine at 40, 25, 20 and 15 per cent into the one number in the ring. Ninety and above is an A.

Passing checks are folded away, so the first thing on the screen is what to fix. Quick wins, the one-line changes a developer does in minutes, come first. The whole report copies out as Markdown for a ticket or a client email, as JSON, or as a score card image for Slack.

What it never does

• Send page content, URLs or anything else to a server. There is no server.
• Ask for an account, a login or a licence key. There is no paid tier.
• Open a tab on install, on update, or ever. No changelog pop-ups, no donation asks. Safe to open in front of a client.
• Ask for permission to read every site you visit. It runs on the tab you click it on, and only then.

Privacy

SEO Readout does not collect anything. There is no account, no analytics, no telemetry, no error reporting and no server. We cannot see which sites you use it on, because nothing is ever sent to us.

What it reads. When you click the icon, it reads the page in the tab you clicked it on: the title, the meta tags, the headings, the images, the links, the text and any JSON-LD. That reading stays in the popup's memory and is gone the moment the popup closes. Nothing runs on any other tab, and nothing runs before you click.

What it requests. Two things, and both go from the page to its own site, not to us:

• a HEAD request for the page's own URL, to read the X-Robots-Tag header, which can carry a noindex that never shows in the HTML;
• a GET request for /robots.txt on the same site, to check whether that URL is blocked.

The social preview loads the page's own og:image so it can show you the card and measure the image. That request goes to wherever the page hosts the image, the same as sharing the link would.

What it stores. Two preferences in the popup's own local storage: which tab you had open and whether you last used the desktop or mobile preview. No page data is stored.

Permissions. activeTab (read the tab you clicked on) and scripting (run the reader in that tab). It does not ask to read every site you visit, and it never will.

Third parties. None. No fonts, scripts or images are loaded from anyone else's servers. The one link out is the "Built by Newcastle Web Co" credit in the footer, and it goes nowhere unless you click it.

Changes. If any of this ever changes, the extension's version number will change with it and this page will say what changed and when. Questions: admin@newcastlewebco.com.au. Last updated 14 September 2026.

Why a web studio gives this away

Every site we build goes through these checks before it ships, and every site we take over gets them on day one. Putting the checks in a popup means a business owner can run them on their own site in ten seconds and see the same list we would send them. Some of those people will fix it themselves. Some will ask us to. Both are fine. If the report on your site is longer than you would like, our SEO work in Newcastle starts with exactly this list, and the structured-data half of it is what our GEO work builds on.

We asked the same questions of 742 business websites across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Maitland in our study, The State of Small Business Websites in the Hunter. The median mobile speed score was 57 out of 100 and only 34% carried LocalBusiness structured data. That is the region. This is the tool that tells you where your own site sits in it.

Questions

Is SEO Readout really free?

Yes. There is no paid tier, no trial, no account and no licence key. It is a tool we wanted for our own work, and giving it away costs us nothing but the time it took to build.

Does it send my pages anywhere?

No. Every check runs inside the popup on your machine. We have no server for it to talk to, so we cannot see which sites you use it on. The only requests it makes go from the page to its own site, to read the X-Robots-Tag header and robots.txt.

Why does it ask for the scripting permission?

That is the permission Chrome uses to run the reader in the tab you clicked on. Paired with activeTab, it means nothing runs until you click the icon, and it only ever runs on that one tab. It does not ask to read every site you visit, and it never will.

How is the score worked out?

Four modules, each out of 100: Basics (title, description, canonical, indexability), Structure (headings, images, text, links), Schema and Social. A fail costs its full weight, a warning half. They combine as 40, 25, 20 and 15 per cent. A noindex page does not lose points; it gets a banner instead, because a page can be perfectly built and still deliberately hidden.

Does it work on WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace sites?

It works on any page open in Chrome, whatever built it. It reads what the browser rendered, so a page that fills itself in with JavaScript is read the way a visitor sees it.