Enter a URL
This tool fetches the raw HTML of any public webpage and displays it as plain, readable text — the same markup a browser downloads before it renders a single pixel. Paste in a URL, run the check, and you get back the exact HTML document the server sent: doctype, head tags, scripts, inline styles, comments left in by developers, and the full body markup, line by line. There's no rendering step, no JavaScript execution, no CSS applied. What you see is the document as it exists on the wire, before a browser engine turns it into a visual page.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A rendered page and a source-code view of that page are often two different things. Content injected by JavaScript after the initial load, elements hidden by CSS, or text swapped in by a client-side framework won't necessarily show up the same way in the two views. Anyone who works with websites — building them, auditing them, or just trying to understand why a page behaves the way it does — eventually needs to see the raw HTML rather than the finished picture.
The workflow is intentionally simple, closer to typing a URL into a browser than to running a technical audit.
https:// or http:// prefix. A bare domain without the protocol may fail to resolve correctly.If a page requires you to be logged in, sits behind a paywall, or is blocked to non-browser requests, the tool will typically return a login page, an error page, or a blocked/redirected response instead of the content you expected — because it's making a plain HTTP request, not authenticating as a specific user with cookies and session state already attached.
Search engines and social platforms don't "see" a webpage the way a human visitor does. Crawlers request the HTML document and parse it, and — depending on the crawler and how heavily the site relies on JavaScript — they may or may not execute scripts before indexing the content. That's the core reason source-code inspection stays relevant even in an era of highly interactive, JavaScript-driven websites: what's present in the initial HTML response is the most reliable baseline for what a crawler is guaranteed to receive.
A few concrete reasons this matters:
<div id="root"></div> and a pile of script tags — while the visible page is fully populated. That gap is exactly what a source-code check exposes, and it's a strong early signal that a site needs server-side rendering, prerendering, or dynamic rendering for search engines to index its content properly.People reach for a source-code viewer for a fairly predictable set of reasons. Some of the most frequent:
It helps to be precise about the terminology, because "source code," "page source," and "the DOM" get used loosely and interchangeably even though they describe different things.
Source code / page source is the raw HTML document exactly as sent by the server in response to an HTTP request. It's static text. If you view it, you're looking at the document before any browser processing happens.
The rendered DOM (Document Object Model) is what a browser builds after parsing that HTML, applying CSS, executing JavaScript, and handling any dynamic changes the page makes to itself while running. Browser developer tools (the "Inspect Element" panel) show you the DOM, not the original source — which is why inspecting an element and viewing page source can show noticeably different markup on JavaScript-heavy sites.
This gap exists because modern websites frequently modify their own markup after the initial load: single-page applications render entire views client-side, A/B testing tools swap content in and out, cookie-consent banners inject and remove elements, and lazy-loading scripts add image and content blocks as a user scrolls. None of that shows up in a raw source-code check, because a source-code check happens before any of it runs.
The practical implication: a source-code tool is not a substitute for a rendered-DOM inspection when you're debugging visual layout issues, client-side interactivity, or dynamically injected content. It's the right tool specifically when you need to know what the server delivered as the baseline document — which is exactly the layer most relevant to crawlability, meta tag verification, and structured data checks.
| Aspect | Raw Source Code (this tool) | Rendered DOM (browser dev tools) |
|---|---|---|
| What it shows | The exact HTML sent by the server | HTML after JavaScript and CSS have been applied |
| JavaScript-injected content | Not included | Included, if the script has already run |
| Best for | Meta tags, canonical URLs, schema markup, crawler-visible content | Layout bugs, dynamic interactions, live element states |
| Reflects what search crawlers first receive | Yes | Only if the crawler executes JavaScript, which varies by crawler and setup |
| Access method | Direct HTTP request, no browser required | Requires an actual browser engine to build the DOM |
| Shows edits made after page load (e.g. cookie banners, A/B tests) | No | Yes, whatever state the page is in when inspected |
<script type="application/ld+json"> block; confirming it's actually present in the raw source (not only added dynamically) is a quick sanity check before running it through a separate schema validator.A few things this type of tool cannot do, by design:
Functionally, yes — both retrieve the raw HTML document as delivered by the server. The advantage of using a standalone tool is that you can check any URL without opening it in your own browser first, which is convenient for quickly checking multiple pages, checking pages you don't want to fully load, or checking from a device or context where browser dev tools aren't practical to use.
This almost always comes down to JavaScript. If a page uses client-side rendering to build part or all of its content, that content is added to the DOM after the initial HTML loads, and a raw source-code check happens before that JavaScript runs. What you see visually in the browser reflects the fully rendered DOM; the source-code tool shows the document before rendering.
Yes, and it's one of the most reliable ways to do it. Enter your page's URL, then search the output for your title tag, meta description, canonical link, and Open Graph tags to confirm they're present, correctly formatted, and not duplicated. Because this shows the actual server response, it avoids the risk of checking a cached or already-modified version of the page in your browser.
The request is a plain HTTP GET without any session cookies or login credentials attached. If the URL you entered requires authentication to view, the server will respond the same way it would to any other unauthenticated visitor — typically with a login screen, an access-denied message, or a redirect.
No. It retrieves and displays the raw HTML exactly as the server sends it, without executing any scripts. If you need to see content that's added to the page dynamically after load, you'll need to inspect the rendered DOM in a browser's developer tools instead.
Viewing the publicly served HTML of a page you can access in a normal browser is standard practice — it's the same information a browser downloads for anyone who visits the page, and the same thing you can do manually with "View Page Source." What you do with that information afterward, such as copying substantial original content or code wholesale, is a separate matter governed by copyright and terms-of-service considerations, not by the act of viewing the markup itself.