How can we help?
Short answers to the common questions. If you're still stuck, email us — see below.
Getting started
How do I install Bot Lens?
Bot Lens is on the Chrome Web Store. Open the listing, click Add to Chrome, and confirm. It works in Chrome and other Chromium browsers such as Edge, Brave, and Arc.
How do I open it on a page?
Go to any normal web page (any http or https address).
Bot Lens adds a small toolbar near the top — click the icon to turn the lenses on,
and click it again to turn them off.
How do I switch lenses and compare with the real page?
Use the Crawler, SEO, GEO, and Audit buttons in the toolbar — the side panel updates to match. Use Show original page to hide the overlays and compare against the untouched page, and Refresh to re-run the analysis.
The lenses
What do the four lenses do?
Crawler — strips JavaScript and shows the raw HTML a crawler sees first, scores render-risk, and flags bot cloaking.
SEO — checks title and meta, canonical, indexability, and structured data, with a SERP preview and rich-result checks.
GEO — shows how legible the page is to answer engines: token budget, fact magnets like prices and dates, and llms.txt.
Audit — one money-page readiness view with a five-lane readiness map, a prioritized fix queue, and a copy-ready implementation kit.
Troubleshooting
The Crawler view looks blank or empty.
That's usually the point. Some sites only build their content with JavaScript, so a crawler that doesn't run scripts sees very little. The Crawler lens shows exactly that — what a no-JavaScript crawler gets.
If the content is there but hidden by scroll animations, switch the reveal mode (Scoped, Off, or All) to force it into view. The structured "crawler's-eye" data in the panel is always reliable, even when the visual render is sparse.
I see a bot wall or "verify you are human" page.
Some sites serve a challenge page (Cloudflare, a captcha, or an access-denied message) to anything that isn't a normal browser. Real crawlers hit the same wall. Bot Lens flags this so you know a bot would be blocked before it ever reaches your content.
Nothing happens on this page.
Bot Lens only runs on normal web pages (http and https).
It can't run on browser pages like chrome://, the Chrome Web Store, or
local files.
Re-fetching "as a bot" shows different content.
That's cloaking detection working. When you view the page as Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and others, Bot Lens compares what each one is served. A difference means the site is handing bots something other than what you see.
The toolbar or panel is in the way.
Both are draggable. Grab the toolbar or the panel header and move it anywhere on screen.
Is my data private?
Yes. Everything runs in your browser. Bot Lens has no servers and collects nothing. Read the privacy policy for the details.
Still stuck?
Email support@botlens.dev and we'll help. Bug reports and feature ideas are welcome too.