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Beta. Scanning is part of the Signals Beta. See the Signals overview for what Beta means here.
A scan happens in your own browser, on your own live site, while you are logged in the way a real visitor or customer would be. That is deliberate. The extension sees the page exactly as it renders for a real person, including anything behind a login, and ABTestly never asks for your credentials and never signs in for you.

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What a scan captures

When you run a scan on a page, the ABTestly browser extension captures four things and sends them to the AI:
  • A desktop screenshot, the full page as it renders on a wide viewport.
  • A mobile screenshot, the full page at a phone width, where most layout problems actually hide.
  • A throttled mobile screenshot, the same phone width reloaded on a slow connection profile and captured at a fixed moment, whether or not the page has finished loading. It shows what a visitor on a poor connection has in front of them while they wait. It is a render under those conditions, not a performance measurement: your real field timings come from the Chrome UX Report, a separate signal.
  • The page structure, the DOM: the headings, buttons, forms, copy, and layout the browser rendered. This is the always present first signal described on the overview. It is read once, from the desktop pass.
That capture is what the AI reads to produce ranked ideas on your idea board.

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Run a scan

1

Install the ABTestly browser extension

Add the ABTestly extension from the Chrome Web Store, then pin the ABTestly icon so you can open it from any page. It adds a side panel to your browser. Open it and sign in with your ABTestly account; if you are already signed in at app.abtestly.com it signs in automatically. The Signals area of your dashboard also links you here. It is free during beta.
2

Open the page you want to audit

Go to the real page on your live site, logged in as your visitors would be. Get it into the state you want the AI to see.
3

Open the side panel and start the scan

Open the ABTestly side panel and start a scan. The extension captures the page structure and the three screenshots, reloading the page twice to do it. Leave the tab alone until it reports back.
4

Read the ideas

The scan lands on your idea board as a ranked list of hypotheses. See Read a scan.

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Funnel walks

A single page is a fine place to start, but the most useful audits follow a path. A funnel walk captures several steps in one pass: home to product to cart to checkout, or landing page to signup to confirmation, capturing each step as you go. Reading the steps together is what makes a funnel walk worth doing. When a step loses far more visitors than the ones around it, Signals can point at that specific page rather than telling you the funnel leaks somewhere. Where the funnel data from connected GA4 reaches the scan, the behavioral signal lines up with the steps you walked, so a drop off between two pages carries a real number, not a guess.
Walk the funnel in the order a visitor would, and capture each step even if it looks fine. A step that looks fine but bleeds visitors is exactly the kind of finding a walk surfaces that a single page scan cannot.

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When a capture does not complete

A scan degrades rather than stopping. If the browser refuses the debugger attachment, or a reload does not finish in time, the extension sends whatever it did capture and the scan runs on that. A scan reports an error and asks you to try again only when it captured no screenshot at all, or when it could not read the page structure. This means a scan can quietly arrive with fewer than three renders. If the ideas that come back read as though the mobile view was never seen, run the scan again before concluding the page is fine.

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Privacy of a scan

  • The capture runs in your browser. ABTestly does not crawl your site from the outside and does not need a login from you.
  • Screenshots capture much more than the part you can see. The desktop and mobile renders run a long way down the page, so content well below the fold is included, though a very long page is cut off and a capture that has to fall back grabs only the visible area. If a page shows real customer data while you scan, that data is in the screenshot.
  • There is no review step before upload. Captures are sent as they are taken, so scanning on a test account, or signed in as a customer whose data you do not mind capturing, is the way to control what leaves the browser. Nothing is held back for you to approve first.
  • The behavioral signal, if you connect it, is read only. See Connect Google Analytics.

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Next

Connect Google Analytics

One click, read only. Lets a scan read the behavior behind the steps you walked, and credit it on the ideas it speaks to.

Read the idea board

Ranking, campaigns, and triage once the scan comes back.
Last modified on September 4, 2026