Text browser emulator
Lynx Text Browser
Read your page the way a text browser sees it
Lynx is a classic browser that never draws images or styles and shows a page as text alone. Enter your URL to see your page's text dump, the inline link numbers and the address list collected at the end.
Enter a URL to begin
Type an address and hit Browse; the text dump, the numbered links and the References list will open here.
Lynx is the text web browser. This tool emulates its functionality.
How to read the dump
- [1] [2] [3]
- Link numbers. Lynx numbers a link inline and gives its real address in the References list at the end. The same address keeps the same number however often it appears.
- [Product photo]
- An image with alt text. What you see inside the brackets is the alt text: a text browser shows that sentence instead of the image.
- [IMG]
- An image with no alt text. Screen readers and text browsers get nothing here, and a search engine cannot tell what the image is about.
- [INPUT] [SELECT]
- Form fields. A text browser marks their position rather than drawing them, and a search engine does not see what sits behind a form either.
- * item
- A list item. Lynx indents lists with an asterisk so the text hierarchy of the page survives in plain text.
- References
- The full numbered list of links on the page. Anchor text and destination sit side by side, which is the fastest way to audit your anchors.
Why a text browser still matters for SEO
You see the part of your content that is actually read
Once design, animation and imagery drop out, the meaning of the page is what remains. If the text dump is thin, what reaches a search engine is thin too.
Missing alt text jumps out at a glance
Every [IMG] in the dump is an image without alt text. That is a direct loss for accessibility and for image search.
You audit anchor text next to its destination
The References list puts the text and the target side by side, so "click here" style anchors become obvious immediately.
You check the order of your content
The dump follows document order. Pages where the main content sits far below menus and announcement bars show it here.
Continue with the same crawl
SEO Browser replays Google's workflow on the same page step by step, and SEO Analysis turns it into a full scorecard.
Frequently asked questions
What is Lynx?
Lynx is a text-based web browser developed since 1992. It runs in a terminal, draws no images or styles and executes no JavaScript. The `lynx -dump` command prints a page's text dump, and this tool shows the same output in your browser.
Does this tool actually run Lynx?
No, we produce the output ourselves: the raw HTML is walked in document order, links are numbered, images become their alt text, form fields become placeholders and everything is wrapped at 80 columns. The result emulates Lynx's behavior while staying fast and predictable.
Why doesn't the dump contain everything on my page?
The dump comes from the raw HTML, the state before JavaScript runs, so sections injected later do not appear. That is the point rather than a gap, because a search engine sees the same thing in its first wave. You can compare the post-render difference in the two-wave tab of SEO Browser.
Is the text browser view still relevant?
The text dump of a page is exactly the content that reaches search engines and screen readers. However rich visual design becomes, that layer has not changed, which keeps a quick text check one of the cheapest SEO audits available.