SearchOps LensThe free Chrome extension for local search
See who really owns a Google results page. Pull the Place ID off any Business Profile. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot the same question and see which of them names you. All of it in your browser, none of it stored anywhere.
Lens is finished and in testing. It goes on the Chrome Web Store shortly.
Four places it works
Lens knows where you are and leads with the tool that fits. It stays hidden until you click it.
See who actually owns the page
Rank tells you where you are in a list. It does not tell you whether anyone will see you. Lens measures the results page in pixels, so you can show a client exactly how much of the screen is spoken for before their listing appears.
- Share of the page taken by ads, the AI Overview, the Map Pack and Web Results
- Your placement, with the position and how far down the page it sits
- Every Web Result with your brand flagged, exportable as a spreadsheet
- One keystroke draws labelled boxes over the page, which makes a clean screenshot for a report
Pull any profile apart in one click
The things you need constantly from a Business Profile are the things Google does not show you. Open any business on the map and Lens has them ready to copy.
- Place ID, CID and coordinates, copied individually
- Primary category, rating and review count
- Name, address, phone and website, as one block or one field at a time
- Deep links that only work once you have the identifiers, including the review link you hand to customers
Ask five engines the same question and see them side by side
Every answer engine renders its answer differently and calls its sources something different, so comparing them today means reading five layouts by eye. Lens reads all of them the same way and puts the result in one table.
- One row per brand, one column per engine, so a gap is obvious at a glance
- Whether you were named, only linked, or missed entirely, per engine
- One click sends the same question to the engines you have not asked yet
- The sources more than one engine drew on, which is where fixing something changes several answers at once
Check an answer engine can actually reach the page
A page can be perfectly open in robots.txt and still be invisible, because the words only appear after JavaScript runs. Lens checks both, for the exact URL you are on rather than for the site in general.
- Sixteen crawlers checked properly, including the rule that decided each verdict
- How much of the page is in the HTML before any JavaScript runs
- Structured data, with the gaps that matter for a local business called out
- Name, address and phone, compared against the reference you set once
What people use it for
Seven jobs it does in under a minute each.
Show a prospect what their search result really looks like
Search their main keyword, open Lens, and screenshot the page with the blocks labelled. Being sixth is abstract. Being sixth with two thirds of the first screen taken by other people is not.
Answer the question every client is now asking
Ask ChatGPT the question a customer would ask, and Lens tells you whether the answer named the client, who it named instead, and which pages it drew on. That is a concrete answer to a question most agencies are still hand waving at.
Fix one page, change several answers
Ask the same question across the engines and Lens shows which sources more than one of them relied on. A directory page that four engines quote is worth more of your afternoon than a fifth blog post, and it is invisible until you line the answers up.
Find out why they are missing from AI answers
Run the page check on their main landing pages. It is usually one of two things: a crawler is blocked, or the content is not in the HTML until JavaScript runs. Both are visible in about ten seconds.
Look at a results page from a town you are not in
Pick a location and Lens re-runs the search as if you were there, with personalisation switched off. No proxy, no VPN, no asking a colleague in Leeds to send you a screenshot.
Read a rival profile without guessing
Open their Business Profile on the map and take the primary category, the review count and the Place ID straight off the page. Category is the single most useful thing to know about a competitor and the hardest to see.
Take the questions off the page
Expand the People Also Ask box and export the lot. Those are the questions the search engine already believes belong to this topic, which makes them a better brief than a keyword list.
An extension that reads AI answers owes you a straight answer
So here it is. Lens reads the page in front of you, turns it into counts and lists in memory, and shows you the result. That is the whole thing.
Nothing is uploaded
Your searches, the profiles you look at and the AI answers you read are not sent to SearchOps or to anyone else.
History stays on your machine
It is off unless you switch it on. When it is on, your last 100 checks live in the browser's own extension storage. Clearing it deletes them.
Two network requests, both explainable
Once a day Lens fetches its own reading instructions so it keeps working when a site changes. Everything else happens only when you press a button.
It asks for almost nothing
The page audit runs on the tab you clicked from, so Lens has no standing access to the sites you visit.
Where Lens stops and SearchOps starts
Lens answers what is true on this page, right now. That is genuinely useful and it is genuinely free. What it cannot do is watch a hundred locations while you sleep.
Lens, free
- One page, one profile, one answer, checked by hand
- Whatever you are looking at right now
- Export to a spreadsheet and take it from there
SearchOps, paid
- Grid scans across a whole town, on a schedule
- Rank tracking that builds a history and alerts you when it moves
- Answer engine coverage measured repeatedly, not once
- Citation, review and site audits across every location you manage
Questions
Is the Chrome extension really free?
Yes. Every tool in it is free and unlimited, with no account and nothing to sign in to. That is possible because nothing in the extension calls a paid service: it reads the page you are already on, in your browser.
Do I need a SearchOps account to use it?
No. The extension works completely on its own. An account only matters if you want to turn a one off check into something tracked over time, which is what the SearchOps platform does.
Does it send my searches or my AI conversations anywhere?
No. Lens reads the page in your browser and shows you what it found. Nothing is sent to SearchOps or anywhere else. If you switch on history, your last 100 checks are stored on your own computer using the browser's extension storage, and clearing it deletes them.
Which answer engines does it read?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot, plus the AI Overview on a Google results page. All of them are read the same way, so the numbers are comparable between them.
How does comparing engines work?
Read an answer on any engine and Lens keeps it on a bench for that question. Ask the same question elsewhere and the columns fill in, so you get one row per brand and one column per engine. The bench lives in memory for the browsing session and is dropped when you close the browser, because answers change and a month-old comparison would be misleading.
Does it tell me my ranking in ChatGPT?
No, because there is no such thing. An answer engine writes a paragraph, it does not produce a ranked list, so a position number would be invented. Lens reports how many times each brand was named and the share between them, which is what actually exists.
Why does it ask for so few permissions?
Because it only needs a few. The page audit runs on the tab whose toolbar button you just clicked, so the extension has no standing access to the sites you visit. The one place it needs more, an advanced crawler check, asks for permission for that single site at the moment you run it.
What happens when Google changes their layout?
Lens refreshes its own reading instructions once a day, so a change on Google's side is usually fixed within a day without you updating anything.
Does blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT?
No, and this is the most common mistake we see. GPTBot is about model training. Answers that browse the live web use different crawlers, so a site can block GPTBot and still be cited. Lens shows each crawler separately with what it actually does, so you can make that call deliberately.
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