With 4.0, Sprout SEO evolves into a powerhouse for content creators, SEOs, and marketers alike. Our latest features are tailored to make your day-to-day research smoother and smarter.

Here’s what’s new:

#1 Google Trends Integration – Track Live Search Trends Directly in the SERP 📈

Unleash the insights of Google Trends without ever leaving the search results page! Now, you can instantly view trends for any keyword as you type, bringing seasonality insights and user behavior right into the search experience.

Key Benefits:

• Immediate trend data right in search results, allowing you to spot demand shifts in real-time
• A comprehensive view of keyword search activity to understand seasonality and market shifts
• Simple visualizations let you quickly pinpoint spikes or drops in interest
• Seamless compatibility with other keyword tools, giving you all your insights in one place
• For more robust research, our bulk Google Trends tool in the popup lets you enter multiple keywords (one per line), opening tabs with individual trend graphs for each term – perfect for extensive research or building presentations.

#2 Location Changer for Google Search – Precision Research from Anywhere 🌍

Ever needed to see search results as they appear in a different location? Now, you can switch locations with ease, viewing results from any city, state, or country to check rankings or scout local competition without needing a VPN.

Whether you’re verifying rankings for “coffee bar near me” or tracking local ads, this feature is ideal for understanding localized search behavior or planning targeted content strategies. Perfect for anyone working in international SEO or localized content!

#3 People Also Asked Extractor – Instant Content Ideas from Google’s PAA 📄

Our People Also Asked (PAA) Extractor automatically clicks through the PAA questions, saving you time and revealing valuable user queries on any topic. Once extracted, it downloads into a CSV, creating a ready-to-go list of questions that people actually want answers to.

Why it’s a Game Changer:

• PAA questions reflect real user intent, making them a goldmine for content creators and SEOs
• Incorporating these questions helps improve visibility, attract more users, and build trust by directly answering the audience’s burning questions
• Use them to craft people-first, helpful content that aligns with Google’s emphasis on quality and relevance
• Great for filling content gaps, finding long-tail keywords, and enhancing your strategy with highly relevant, people-driven topics

Enhanced Interface & Performance Boost

This release isn’t just about new features; we’ve also upgraded the experience. A full visual overhaul makes Sprout SEO more intuitive, smoother, and faster than ever. With a clean, responsive interface, you’ll find it easier to access insights and put them into action.

Why 4.0 is a Must-Have for SEOs & Marketers

Sprout SEO 4.0 bridges the gap between data and insight, offering powerful tools to keep up with user behavior and competition. By cutting down on repetitive tasks, saving you time, and integrating crucial research features, this release lets you focus on what matters: creating impactful, relevant content.

Since we've introduced the "other tools" tab, we've added quick links to open the current page in your favorite tool.

The icons you saw, were the favicons from these websites.

However one of these websites, the internet archive has been under a DDOS attack since a week, as a result the popup takes forever to open.

Our apologies, were are planning a big new release but that one isn't ready yet. So in the mean time a quick bugfix to help speed up the popup again.

We noticed there were certain times when the extension took a little long to open up.

We fixed it.

Incorporated a whole bunch of caching and async loading of external checks to improve the speed of the extension opening up and showing the data you're looking for.

In our first iteration of the robots checker, we only checked against the Meta Robots tag to figure out if the page you were viewing gave a direction to the robots to “index”, “noindex”, “follow” or “nofollow” the page you were viewing.

Of course we added appropriate red, orange and green icons to help you quickly identify the status, but we knew we could do better.

So with this update we also:

• Do a live check against the robots.txt file. When you visit a URL impacted by an "Allow" or "Disallow" directive in robots.txt, the extension will display the exact rule, allowing you to copy it or view the live robots.txt file effortlessly.
  
  Additionally, the entire robots.txt file will be shown with the relevant rule highlighted (if applicable). With one click you can open up the robots.txt itself, or copy it to your clipboard. Pretty neat, right? 
• Look at the x-robots-tag headers. Identifying robots directives in the HTTP header used to be challenging, but not anymore with this extension.
  
  Any particular exclusions will be clearly highlighted, along with the complete HTTP header, making the specific exclusions easy to spot! And of course you can also copy the full HTTP header to your clipboard to easily share with your development team.

So with this update you can be sure to save some more time again, by understanding whether a particular page on your website is accessible to search engines yes or not.

In Sprout SEO, up until now, we would assume that the sitemap of any website was located on /sitemap.xml and link to it from the bottom part of the page info tab.

But you know what they say about assumptions...

So we fixed that, what we do right now is:

#1 We check if there is a sitemap on the default location
#2 Check if the sitemap is referenced correctly from the robots.txt
#3 If the sitemap is present and referenced in the robots.txt, all green ✅
#4 If there is no sitemap on the default location and no reference in the robots.txt 🚨
#5 If there is a sitemap on the default location but no reference in the robots.txt ⚠️

Oh, and if multiple sitemaps are found in the robots.txt, we list them all in the extension.

Next to these, we've added two handy extra features in the right-click menu that work in the Google Search Results Page (SERP):

##Remove breadcrumbs from the SERP

The option to remove the 'breadcrumbs', which replace URLs in search results and give you back the full URL of the page you're trying to visit.

This is incredibly useful when performing site:domain.com searches, and you want to see if strange URLs appear in search results.

##Add position numbers in front of search results in the SERP

Getting tired of counting results in the SERP to see at which position you or your competitor ranks?

We've added a little Google SERP Counter that adds the position of a result next to the search results on Google.  Like this you can immediately see at what position you are.

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Small bugfix 🐛 release

Living in a country with three official languages (Belgium), makes me fully aware of the issues that incorrect Hreflang tags can have on your rankings.

This update is designed to automate the process of checking a site's Hreflang tag deployment.

With this update, we take a readout of a URL's Hreflang tags and then crawl them to assess if they back reference your current URL.

This saves precious time when it comes to assessing a site's language targeting and Hreflang architecture, allowing you to get a fast and reliable impression of the status of a site's optimization for international organic search.

We all know the importance of links on your pages. So, this edition is fully focused on making you understand all the links found on any page.

Are they working, leading to a 404 page or maybe to a redirect?

We've added a new tab called "Links".

Here you can:

• See the total amount of links, the total amount of unique links, the number of internal and external links
• Highlight all internal links on the page, or highlight all the external links on a page
• Export all internal or external links into a CSV
• Get an overview of the extension of all the internal and external links, together with their anchor text and HTTP status code.

When highlighting all internal or external links on a page, it shows a little pop-up on the page with color coding explaining the number of links:

• with a query string at the end
• with a no-follow tag
• blocked by robots
• to a page that has a redirect
• to a page that gives a client error
• to a page that gives a server error

Highlighting of all external and internal links is also possible from the newly created contextual or "right click" menu on any page, together with the options from the right click menu to:

• Test the current page in the Rich Results tester
• Test the current page with the schema.org validator
• Perform a site:domain.com search
• Perform a -inurl:https Google search
• Test your speed on WebPageTest
• Test your speed on GTMetrix
• Test your speed on Page speed insights
• Test your speed on Lighthouse
• View the current site on Ahrefs
• View the current site on Archive.org
• View the current site on BuzzSumo
• View the current site in Majestic
• View the current site on Moz
• View the current site on Semrush
• View the current site on SimiliarWeb
• View the current site in Sistrix

We'll save you seconds - dozens or hundreds of times per day - which quickly adds up.

Oh, and we've got one more trick up our sleeves...

From now on, you will get an overview of all the headings on a page, so not just the amount of H1's, H2's, etc., but also the actual headings with the option to export or copy them.