See the web like search engines do!

Back in 2008, SEO was this mysterious black art. Web developers spent hours tweaking HTML and meta tags, essentially flying blind. How do you know if your Flash navigation is helping or hurting rankings? What does Google actually see when it crawls your site?

That’s where Browseo came in – a browser that showed you the web exactly like search engines see it.

Stripping away the fancy stuff

The idea was elegantly simple: strip away the visual fluff and show the raw HTML structure that search engines process. But we went further. Browseo became a comprehensive analysis tool with color-coded links, cloaking detection, and instant feedback on page structure.

The real innovation was the cloaking detection system. Browseo made multiple requests using different user agents, comparing content each time. If your server was serving different content to search engines versus browsers – a technique that could result in severe penalties – Browseo threw an error immediately. This feature alone saved countless websites from accidental penalties.

Then the SEO world noticed

What started as a personal tool quickly gained traction. The validation came when Rand Fishkin and Garret French began recommending it to their audiences. That was surreal – having SEO legends I’d been reading suddenly talking about something I’d built in my spare time.

But the most interesting development was when Yahoo! engineers reached out. They were fascinated by some parsing techniques I’d developed and wanted to discuss how HTML edge cases affected their indexing algorithms. Those conversations gave me insights into search engine internals that money couldn’t buy.

Finally, you could see what you were optimizing for

Browseo became standard toolkit for SEO professionals. Instead of guessing whether optimization efforts were working, they could see immediately how changes affected semantic structure. It turned SEO from guesswork into a visual, iterative process.

The feedback was always the same: “Finally, I can see what I’m actually optimizing for.” That simple shift – from invisible to visible – changed how people approached search optimization entirely.

We even had a mobile app

We even developed a mobile app version, which led to an unexpected perk – Mozilla gave us a Firefox phone prototype to experiment with. While the mobile app is now defunct, that prototype was a fun glimpse into alternative mobile ecosystems that never quite took off.

I developed Browseo together with Jonathan Schikowski, a fantastic SEO expert who manages the tool today. Check it out at browseo.net – it’s still there, showing the web like search engines really see it.