Chrome Extension
The AXO Chrome extension lets you preview how AXO will render experiences on any URL and author zones directly on your live site – no engineering required. The dashboard's Zones page also has a Visual editor that loads your storefront through AXO's preview proxy and lets you click an element to create a zone. The extension is the right tool when the proxy can't load your site – pages behind a login, storefronts that block framing or bot traffic (Cloudflare, Akamai), modals, and anything only a real browser session renders – because it runs on the page you already have open.
Install & sign in
The extension is not yet on the Chrome Web Store – AXO provides it as a package. Unzip it, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked, and select the unzipped folder, then pin the AXO icon. Preview works with no account. To author, open the side panel's Authoring tab and paste your extension token, which AXO issues to you (it is your dashboard session presented as a bearer token – treat it like a password; signing out of the dashboard revokes it). The extension does not read your dashboard cookies, so logging in to the dashboard alone is not enough.
Preview mode
Click Preview on this page in the extension popup. The real tag.js is injected against a private per-user sandbox site, so you can see zones and variants render live on any URL without touching production. Use this to rehearse experience decisions, demo ideas to stakeholders, or sanity-check a variant before publishing.
Zones and variants you author from the Preview tab save to your sandbox – not to a real site. To publish a change, switch to Authoring mode and target the real site.
Authoring mode
Pick a real site you own from the site picker, then use the element picker to select any DOM node on the page. The extension auto-detects common fields (title, image_url, price, cta_url) from the DOM and uses AI to enrich semantic extras like eyebrow text, testimonials, and descriptions. Publish the zone, and it's immediately available to your campaigns in the dashboard.
The site picker only lists non-sandbox sites you have access to, so you can't accidentally publish changes to the wrong tenant.