A Detailed SEO Extension alternative, and when you actually need one
Short version: the Detailed SEO Extension is very good, it is free, and for most people it is the right answer. This page exists because "most people" is not everyone, and because a comparison page that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
I build websites for clients. Teardown exists because I needed something Detailed is not trying to be: a tool that keeps a record across many pages and many clients, rather than one that inspects the page in front of you. If you only need the second thing, install Detailed and stop reading.
What Detailed does well
It surfaces on-page SEO data instantly: title, meta description, canonical, robots directives, heading structure and schema markup, without opening DevTools. It is free with no account, no tiers and no feature gates, and it has been that way for years.
In September 2025 Ahrefs acquired Detailed.com and the extension, and its founder Glen Allsopp joined the company. Ahrefs stated that existing features stay free. That is worth knowing for two reasons: the tool now has a serious company maintaining it, which is a point in its favour, and if you are deliberately keeping your stack away from any one vendor, Detailed is now part of Ahrefs.
Its schema visualisation is genuinely useful and Teardown has no equivalent. If reading structured data is a regular part of your job, that alone is a good reason to keep Detailed installed.
Where Teardown is different
The difference is not a longer feature list. It is that Teardown assumes you are auditing many pages, for someone else, and will need to show your working later.
| Need | What Teardown does |
|---|---|
| Client work | Scans are grouped into projects. One per client or campaign, renameable, deletable, kept apart. |
| A record | Every scan is kept, up to 50 per project, so you can come back in a month and see what a page looked like before the rebuild. |
| Before and after | Pick any two scans and diff them: indexability, metadata, health score, counts, and the heading outline compared line by line. Built for staging against production, and for proving a release changed what you said it would. |
| Handing it over | TXT report, CSV of a project's whole history, outline as Markdown, palette as hex. The CSV escapes formula injection, so opening it in Excel is safe. |
| A number a client understands | A health score out of 100 with the breakdown shown as bars, so it can be explained rather than just quoted. Nothing scores for merely existing, and nothing is scored off a measurement that is not reliable. |
| Design review | Colour palette ranked by how often each colour is actually used, the font stack in play, and a batch image scraper foldered by hostname. |
Where Teardown is the weaker choice
Being straight about this is the only reason to trust the rest of the page.
- No schema visualisation. Detailed has it, Teardown does not. If you read structured data often, this is decisive.
- No broken link checking. Teardown audits links and anchor text but does not request each one to find dead ends. SEO Minion, also free, does.
- Brand new, and unproven at scale. Detailed has hundreds of thousands of weekly users and years of bug reports behind it. Teardown has neither yet. That is a real difference in how much you should trust either one on a page that matters.
- One person maintains it. Me. Detailed has Ahrefs.
The honest recommendation
They are both free, so this is not really an either/or. Install Detailed. If you are also juggling several client sites and find yourself screenshotting results into a document so you have something to point at next month, that is the specific gap Teardown was built to fill, and it is worth adding too.
If you would rather not install anything to decide, the free web checkers on this site run in the browser: paste a URL and see the kind of output Teardown produces.
What both share
Neither charges, neither requires an account, and both read the rendered page in your own tab, which means both work on staging sites and pages behind a login that no third-party crawler can reach. Teardown additionally keeps everything in local storage with no backend at all, described in full in the privacy policy.
Related
Competitor details checked July 2026 against public sources, including the acquisition announcement on detailed.com and Search Engine Journal. Teardown is not affiliated with Ahrefs, Detailed or SEO Minion. Feature sets move; if something here is out of date, tell me and I will correct it.