MetaScout Support
Help for MetaScout, the SEO meta tag checker and social preview Chrome extension published by Cardamon Inc.
Product page - what MetaScout does, screenshots, permissions and FAQ.
Get in touch
The fastest route is the support button in the extension's header (the speech-bubble icon): it opens a conversation that stays inside the side panel, and replies show up there. You can also email support@cardamon.org. A real person reads every message.
Bug reports are most useful with the page URL (if you can share it), what you expected and what happened instead. The extension keeps no logs and sends us nothing on its own, so what you tell us is all we have to work from.
"Nothing audited yet" - how to run the first audit
Click the MetaScout toolbar icon on any normal website, or press Alt+Shift+S. Chrome only lets an extension read a page after you invoke it on that tab, which is why opening the panel from Chrome's side-panel menu shows the empty state instead of an audit.
On your very first click Chrome asks whether MetaScout may read the pages you browse. Allow turns on auto-audit (every tab is audited as you switch to it); Deny keeps MetaScout to the tabs you click it on. You can change your mind any time in Settings, and nothing leaves your device either way.
"This page can't be audited"
Chrome blocks every extension on its own pages (chrome://, the Chrome Web Store, the new-tab page) and on some special URLs such as PDF viewers and view-source. Switch to a regular website. If a normal site shows this state, reload the tab and click the icon again.
The score, and what the Suggestions tab counts
Each counted check is worth the same share of 100: a pass scores full, a warning half, a failure nothing. Informational rows (heading outline, hreflang, structured-data types) are shown but not scored. The Suggestions tab ranks every failing or warning check by the points you get back for fixing it. The top 3 fixes are free, each with a plain-English how-to and, where the fix is a tag, a snippet you can copy into the page's <head>, plus one nice-to-have; Pro unlocks the full list.
MetaScout audits what the browser received - the rendered DOM after scripts ran - so a tag injected by JavaScript counts, and a tag only present in the raw HTML that a script later removed does not. That is also what social crawlers and Google's renderer see in most cases.
The preview does not match what X / Facebook / LinkedIn actually shows
Three usual causes:
- The platform cached an older version of the page. MetaScout shows the tags as they are now; the platforms re-crawl on their own schedule. Use each platform's sharing debugger to force a refresh after you change tags.
- The image is not reachable by the platform. A relative URL, an
http://image, an image behind a login, or one larger than the platform's limit is dropped silently. The chips under each preview say exactly which tag feeds each slot. - Fallbacks. X falls back to Open Graph when its own tags are missing, and the card layout (summary vs. summary_large_image) follows
twitter:card. The preview reproduces these rules; when a tag is missing the chip says which fallback was used.
Robots & AI shows nothing until I click
By design. Checking robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt means three requests to the audited site, so MetaScout only makes them when you press the button. "Soft 404" means the site answered 200 with an error page instead of the file. Crawler rows are evaluated from the robots.txt groups for the page's path; "limited" means the agent is allowed overall but blocked from some paths.
Which features are Pro?
The full audit, the Suggestions tab with the top 3 ranked fixes, all four previews, the crawler check, the Changes card in History (score before and after, the first 3 changes, plus the latest audit in the timeline) and Markdown / HTML export are free and stay free. Pro adds the full Suggestions list (every ranked fix with its how-to and snippet, in the panel and in exported reports, instead of the top 3), the full History (every change, the full timeline of the page and comparing any two audits), Batch audit (a list of URLs or the site's sitemap, one combined report) and white-label reports (your name, logo and notes; the MetaScout footer switched off). Current prices are shown in the Pro dialog inside the extension.
One license key works on up to 3 browsers. There is no account: the key is the only credential, and it is emailed to you after purchase.
"This key is already active on 3 browsers"
Reinstalls and new profiles count as browsers. In Settings, the license card offers Sign out other browsers, which frees every other seat instantly and keeps this one. Seats that go unused for 60 days also free themselves.
Lost your key, cancelling, refunds
- Lost key: open Settings in the extension and use Lost your key? - enter the email you bought with and the key is re-sent.
- Subscription: Manage subscription in Settings opens the billing portal (run by Paddle, our merchant of record) where you can update payment details or cancel. Access continues to the end of the paid period.
- Refunds: email support@cardamon.org with the email you bought with. Paddle's consumer terms apply.
Keyboard shortcuts
- Alt+Shift+S - audit the current tab (change it at chrome://extensions/shortcuts)
- R - re-audit · C - copy the Markdown report · E - download the HTML report
- 1-5 - Audit, Suggestions, Previews, Robots & AI, History · 6 or B - Batch
Privacy
The audit runs on your device and page content is never transmitted. The full list of what the extension stores and the few requests it makes to cardamon.org is in the MetaScout privacy policy.