Recommended Workflow

AXO gives you three different vantage points on your site. They're not redundant – they're stacked, and most setup work goes faster when you use the right one for the right job.

Discovery – server-side

Deep Analysis & the AXO Assistant

Both run server-side. Deep Analysis (Sitemap tab) crawls your URLs, parses the static HTML, and uses Claude Haiku to extract page types, product structure, brand voice, and candidate zones into page_profiles. The in-app Assistant reasons over that same data and can orchestrate bulk operations (create N zones, draft variants for M segments, …) without you clicking through each one.

Strong at: bulk discovery, page-type taxonomy, drafting starter copy across many segments at once. Blind to: client-rendered SPA content (sees the empty<div id="root">), logged-in pages, modals, and anything created at runtime. Selectors are LLM guesses from static HTML – often brittle on real sites.

Authoring – in your browser

AXO Chrome extension

Runs as a content script in your real browser, on your authenticated session, on the fully-rendered DOM. Point-and-click element picker. Field detection runs deterministically over the DOM subtree you picked (title / image / price / CTA) – no LLM guessing for selectors. AI enrichment only fills semantic extras like eyebrow and testimonial. Selectors are generated from the element you actually clicked, so they match in production.

Strong at: SPAs, logged-in pages, modals/popovers, dynamic class names, sites behind Cloudflare/Akamai – anywhere server-side crawling falls down. Slower for: bulk authoring across many pages (one page at a time). Install steps live on the Install page.

Orchestration – conversational

AXO Assistant (in-app)

Once zones are real (authored via the extension) and pages are indexed (via Deep Analysis), the Assistant becomes the fastest way to do repetitive work: "draft variants for all 5 segments on the hero zone of every product page," "create a campaign brief from this PDF," "promote these draft variants to active." It calls the same backend tools the dashboard does, just in one batched conversation.

The pattern

  1. Discover. Run Deep Analysis (or ask the Assistant to) to populate page profiles and surface a starting taxonomy + recommended-zones list.
  2. Review. Look at the recommended zones in Zones. Approve the ones that look plausible; ignore the others.
  3. Author with the extension. On each priority page, open the AXO side panel → Authoring → pick the actual element → publish. This is the step that gives you selectors that will match in production.
  4. Orchestrate with the Assistant. Once zones are live, batch-create variants and campaigns conversationally instead of clicking through the dashboard one row at a time.
Rule of thumb:if you're thinking about a specific page, reach for the extension. If you're thinking about many pages or many segments, reach for the Assistant. Deep Analysis is the once-per-site (and once-per-major-site-change) discovery step that makes both of those work.