Skip to content
Answerworthy AI

Scan from your browser

Some sites sit behind a CDN or WAF (Cloudflare, Akamai, and similar) that challenges or blocks our datacenter scanner. When that happens, a server-run scan can still measure a lot — an AI engine can often fetch the page from its own verified-bot infrastructure, so those checks come back inferred — but the checks that need a directly-read page are gated rather than measured.

A browser scan closes that gap. You run the same audit from your own browser, on your real IP, against a site that serves you normally. The result is the same report as the free scan, with the previously walled-off checks read directly instead of inferred.

When you’ll see the prompt

Section titled “When you’ll see the prompt”

On a completed scan whose report shows bot-wall or engine-recovery signals — a challenged scanner, engine-recovered content, or a gated layer — the report surfaces a “Some checks couldn’t be read from our servers” banner and, on the affected checks, a subtle “recoverable from your browser” hint. Both link here.

You will not see the prompt when:

  • the scan was clean (nothing was walled), or
  • the incomplete result is only from checks a browser can’t improve (a plain not-applicable check like backlinks or hreflang is never treated as browser-recoverable), or
  • the scan was already a browser scan (it wouldn’t ask you to re-do it).

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

A browser scan is powered by the AEO browser extension. Because the fetch happens in your browser, on your network, the site serves it the same content a normal visitor gets — no bot challenge stands between the scanner and your content.

  1. Install the extension and open its popup on the site you want to scan.
  2. Connect it to your account at app.answerworthy.ai/connect-extension. This links the extension to your workspace with a token — no password is stored in the extension, and no engine or API keys ever reach your browser.
  3. Click “Scan this site.” A browser scan always audits your site’s homepage, so if you’re on an inner page the extension switches that tab to your homepage to capture it, then gathers your homepage (raw and rendered), robots.txt, llms.txt, the sitemap, and the key pages, and posts that bundle to the platform.
  4. The platform runs the exact same audit pipeline on your real-IP content and stores it as its own scan, tagged as a browser scan. Crawler-access checks (does the site serve GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and other verified bots) are still measured from our servers, because that question is specifically about datacenter-bot access — the one thing your browser can’t answer. Every check stays honestly labeled by where it was read.

What you get

Section titled “What you get”
  • The same report — score, category scorecard, roadmap, and evidence stack — with the content, structured-data, and rendering checks read directly from your real-IP fetch instead of inferred.
  • A distinct scan in your history, so you can see the server view and the browser view side by side.
  • Honest provenance throughout: a browser scan has no crawler-verdict spoofing and no screenshot layer (a content-script fetch can’t capture one), and says so rather than faking it.

Limits

Section titled “Limits”
  • A browser scan reads what your browser can reach. Scan a site you can load normally (typically your own).
  • Crawler-access verdicts still come from our servers, on purpose — a browser can’t prove it is a verified AI bot.
  • A browser scan has no page screenshot — a content-script fetch can’t capture one — so the report’s “as rendered” preview shows a “no preview available” placeholder for a browser scan rather than a thumbnail.
Section titled “Related”