Detailed SEO vs SEOquake

An SEO auditor opens a client’s homepage for the first time and wants two very different things in the same five minutes: a fast read on the title, meta description, and heading structure, and a deeper look at keyword density, internal linking, and how the page stacks up against the SERP around it. Two free extensions have quietly become the industry’s default answer to both needs, and they now belong to two competing SEO platforms that most practitioners already pay for something else from.

Detailed SEO vs SEOquake is less a feature fight than an ownership story, since Semrush and Ahrefs each ended up holding one of the most-installed on-page extensions in SEO almost by accident, one built in-house and one bought outright. Verifying who owns what, what changed after the acquisition, and what each tool still gets wrong is the same homework we do before writing about any tool on the Skyfield Digital blog.

Who Actually Owns These Two Extensions Now?

SEOquake’s Chrome Web Store listing names Semrush Inc. as the developer, which tracks with the extension’s long history as an in-house Semrush product built to funnel users toward the full Semrush platform. It is the older, more established of the two by most measures: over 3 million cumulative downloads, availability in nine languages, and a Chrome listing that currently shows roughly 1,000,000 active users.

Detailed SEO Extension has a different, more recent story. It was built independently by Glen Allsopp under the Detailed.com brand, and Ahrefs acquired the site and the extension in September 2025, with Allsopp joining Ahrefs full time. At the time of the deal, Detailed.com reported roughly 970,000 unique visitors over the prior year and the extension itself had more than 450,000 weekly Chrome users plus around 7,000 on Firefox. Allsopp stated publicly that the extension would remain free for every existing feature, with any future premium additions layered on top rather than paywalling what already worked.

What Does SEOquake Try to Cover in One Toolbar?

SEOquake earns its reputation as a SERP analysis Chrome extension by overlaying metrics directly onto Google’s results page, one line per listing, exportable to CSV for anyone building a competitive tracking sheet. Beyond the overlay it runs full webpage SEO audits including mobile compatibility checks, keyword density analysis with configurable stop-word lists, internal and external link reporting, and URL or domain comparison tools for sizing up two pages side by side. A customizable parameter system lets users add or remove which metrics show up in the toolbar itself.

That flexibility carries some visible age. SEOquake’s own official guide to creating custom parameters still uses Alexa Rank and a StumbleUpon view counter as its two worked examples, and both services have been shut down for years, Alexa Rank in May 2022 and StumbleUpon back in 2018. The extension itself keeps shipping real updates, currently version 3.13.5 as of May 18, 2026, so the tool is not abandoned. The documentation simply has not caught up with which parameters still return live data and which ones quietly return nothing.

What Does Detailed SEO Extension Deliberately Leave Out?

Almost everything SEOquake tries to do at once. Detailed SEO Extension is built as an on-page SEO checker extension in the narrowest, most deliberate sense: one click surfaces title tags, meta descriptions, meta robots directives, a heading-tag view with visual hierarchy, and the page’s structured data markup, including hreflang tags with their status codes shown inline. There is no SERP overlay, no keyword density report, and no custom parameter system to configure.

What it adds instead is oddly specific and genuinely useful: duplicate content detection that checks whether the page’s content appears elsewhere on the web, a Googlebot user-agent switcher for viewing a page the way Google’s crawler sees it, nofollow and rel-attribute highlighting on every link, People Also Asked extraction from search results, and a right-click menu that opens the current page directly inside Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush’s own tools. That last detail is a small irony worth sitting with: an extension now owned by Ahrefs still ships a one-click shortcut into Semrush, the company behind its closest competitor in this very comparison.

How Do Users Actually Rate Each Extension Right Now?

SEOquake’s Chrome Web Store listing shows 4.5 stars across roughly 2,600 reviews, a strong showing for a tool carrying this much feature surface area and this long a history. Detailed SEO Extension scores higher still at 4.9 stars, though across a far smaller sample of 230 reviews, the natural result of a narrower, more recently prominent tool with a smaller but more satisfied installed base.

Both extensions are current on updates rather than coasting on reputation. SEOquake shipped version 3.13.5 on May 18, 2026, and Detailed SEO Extension shipped version 2.2.7 on June 2, 2026, both well within the last several months of this article’s publication, so neither tool’s rating gap can be explained away by one side going stale while the other kept working.

Where Does Each Extension Pull Ahead on Paper?

Neither column is objectively longer than the other once duplicate content detection and Googlebot user-agent switching are weighed against SERP overlays and keyword density. The honest read is that SEOquake optimizes for staying open in a pinned tab all day, while Detailed SEO Extension optimizes for answering one question and getting out of the way, and the feature list on each side reflects that design choice rather than one team simply building more than the other.

Which Extension Fits Which Kind of Work?

Competitive SERP research favors SEOquake, since the overlay puts metrics on every result at once rather than requiring a click into each page individually. Someone building a rank-tracking spreadsheet or scoping a new content cluster gets more done per search here than with any single-page checker, which is exactly the volume work behind the research process clients cite when choosing Skyfield, where a full competitive landscape has to be scanned before any single page gets a recommendation.

That kind of high-volume scanning only covers half the job, though. Once the opportunities are identified, someone still has to move through each page one at a time and confirm the basics are actually in place before it ships.

Fast pre-publish and post-launch checks favor Detailed SEO Extension instead. A content team publishing several pages a day does not want a full toolbar loading on every tab, it wants one click confirming the title, description, and schema are correct before moving on. That habit is a natural fit for the kind of quality gate we build into how Skyfield’s own team operates day to day, where dozens of pages can move through review in a single sitting.

The same logic scales down to a single site just as easily as it scales up across dozens of pages a day. What changes is not the tool, but how many pages get run through it before lunch.

Local and regional campaigns tend to reach for whichever tool the practitioner already trusts for other reasons, since neither extension has a location-specific feature the other lacks. What matters more in that context is consistency: running the same checker on every page in a multi-location rollout, the kind of discipline that shows up across the local SEO campaigns we manage, where thirty near-identical location pages need thirty consistent checks rather than thirty different ones.

Agencies juggling clients across platforms often end up installing both anyway. SEOquake earns its slot for prospecting and SERP-level research, Detailed SEO Extension earns its slot for the fast per-page glance, and the right-click shortcut into Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush inside Detailed SEO Extension means switching tools mid-audit costs one click rather than a new tab search.

A toolbar that shows you everything and a popup that shows you one thing are solving different problems. Neither one tells you whether what it shows you is actually good enough to rank.

What Do Neither Extension Tell You About AI Search Readiness?

Both tools report what exists on a page. Neither one scores whether that content is specific and structured enough for an AI answer engine to lift a clean quote out of it, since that question did not exist when either extension’s core feature set was designed. SEOquake’s keyword density report and Detailed SEO Extension’s schema viewer both stop at confirming a structural element is present, not at judging whether it is written well enough to earn a citation.

That gap is exactly what Skyfield’s GEO service is built to close, treating extractability and specificity as first-class ranking factors rather than an afterthought bolted onto a traditional on-page checklist.

Closing that gap in practice means running a different kind of check altogether, one that does not just confirm a schema tag exists but asks whether the sentence sitting inside it is specific enough to be worth quoting.

Vantage, our free SEO and GEO extension, was built specifically to answer that question, running a 77-rule weighted audit across on-page fundamentals, schema, E-E-A-T signals, and GEO extractability, with every finding scored by severity, 11 critical, 42 warning, 24 info, rather than a flat list of what is present or missing. It does not overlay SERPs or track keyword density, so it competes with neither SEOquake nor Detailed SEO Extension directly. It answers the question both of them leave open: not what is on the page, but whether the page has actually earned the ranking it wants.

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