9,000 users, nearly 500 five-star reviews: behind a keyword extension is an SEO training school with 20,000 students
What it is A Chrome extension that shows monthly search volume, cost-per-click, competition, and trends directly on Google results pages, plus a web workbench for bulk keyword lookup. Pay-as-you-go credits from $5, credits don't expire.
Why it took off The training provider iSkills added it to the catalog of its new SEBT NEXT course. After the cohort started, about 7 thousand students installed it in a month, and in late October students gave 414 five-star reviews within three days. Pay-per-use pricing against Keywords Everywhere's annual fee is the selling point, but that wasn't the main driver of this wave.
CHow you could follow Don't build another keyword extension. If you have a bootcamp or paid community, turn the task your students repeat every week into a tool, make it standard in the course, then spread it through "X alternative" comparison pages and directory sites.
9,000 users · rating 4.986666666666666 (481)
KWScanner is a Chrome extension that shows search volume and cost-per-click directly on Google results pages. Listed in May, it grew from 1 thousand to 9 thousand users over two months starting in September, rated 4.99 stars. Its pricing does target the weak spot of leader Keywords Everywhere, but pricing isn't what drove this wave: a Pakistani SEO training school built the tool, put it in its new course catalog, and most people installing it and leaving five-star reviews are that school's students.
A five-star review saying "thanks iskills"
In Nov 5, a five-star review from Shakaib Shah appeared in KWScanner's Chrome store reviews: "unbelivable tool! thanks iskills". The reviews from the days around it look much the same: Madiha Fatima wrote "Best tool I have ever used", Hafiz Subhan wrote "amazing tool", Sameer Ahmed wrote "love it, great tool". The names are almost all South Asian, and the reviews are all short.
The extension's store page, website and About page never mention iSkills. You have to look for the name somewhere else: iSkills is a Pakistani SEO and freelance training institute, founded by M Tanveer Nandla, whose website reads "20,000+ Learners" and "12K+ SEBT Learners". Its flagship course, SEBT NEXT, is taught in Urdu, runs 200 hours, is sold as a one-time $216,2026 payment, and started in Aug 22. In the course page's outline, after "Welcome Note", "Join Social Channels" and "Weekly Class Schedule", and before the first real lesson, there's a section called "🔍 KWScanner by iSkills".
What it is and how it charges
Search any keyword on Google and its monthly search volume, average cost-per-click, competition and a 12-month trend chart appear right below the search box. There's also a web dashboard where you can batch-check up to 3,000 keywords at once, with lists, filters and CSV/Excel export, and push them to Google Ads.
The money is made outside the extension, sold as credits: 1 credits check 1 keywords, packs start at $5, and high volume drops to $0.2 per thousand ($200 for 1M credits). Credits never expire, sign-up gives 10k credits, and the first purchase gets double (kwscanner.com, 11-06). The data source, in its own words, is "authoritative sources including Google Keyword Planner", meaning it resells existing data rather than scraping it.
This pricing is aimed at the category leader. Keywords Everywhere launched in 2015, has 1M users, but since 2023 its free tier no longer provides data, it now sells only annual plans, the cheapest at $84 a year, its credits expire after 12 months, and its store rating has slipped to 3.3. KWScanner's website has a dedicated "Keywords Everywhere Alternative" page with a line-by-line comparison, and its last row reads "Annual subscription ($84–$1,440/yr)" against "Pay-as-you-go, starting from $5".
Where DubFlow's 9,000 users came from
Putting the user curve next to the course start date (third-party stats from extops.dev, 11-06 scrape):
| Date | users | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 05-23 | — | Chrome and Firefox versions listed the same day |
| 08-22 | — | SEBT NEXT starts |
| 09-01 | About 1k | |
| 09-04 | 3k | Published 1.3.1, permissions cut from 174 to 7 |
| 09-17 | 6k | |
| 10-04 | 8k | |
| 10-29 | 9k | Then flat at 9k ever since |
Two weeks after the course started it jumped suddenly, then gained about 1k a week, then flattened a month later. That's the shape of a batch of new students installing one after another, not a public market slowly warming up. A more direct clue: the Firefox version, listed the same day, has only 11-06 46 daily active users and 0 ratings. If it had spread through SEO circles on its own, Firefox should be close to zero; if the teacher had students install a Chrome extension in class, it would look exactly like this.
435 five-star ratings came in three days
The rating count curve is steeper: in Oct it went from 24 to 21 ratings, then in Oct 27 it became 435, adding 414 in three days, and the average moved from 4.71 to 4.99. Those days the course was running on the student pages. I haven't seen any original words saying the teacher explicitly told students to "go give five stars", so that's an inference; but the reviewers are students, which is well supported by the names in the reviews and the "thanks iskills" comment.
What this means for the store is very concrete: a new extension with a 4.7-star rating and 21 ratings and one with a 4.99 rating and nearly 500 ratings have very different odds of being clicked in search results.
Beyond students, it also works the public market, with cheap SEO tactics: in October it published a batch of "Keywords Everywhere / Keyword Surfer / Semrush / Ahrefs alternative" comparison pages, built a free keyword-volume lookup page and a "Claude for SEO" page; it listed itself on directory sites such as SourceForge, Slashdot and Crunchbase, with TinyLaunch set for 11-09 launch; its Facebook page has 661 followers and a WhatsApp channel attached. This is exactly what the SEBT course's "build small tools to earn backlinks" module teaches, so the school is demonstrating with its own tool. I found no sign of paid ads, and almost nobody on X, Reddit or in the media mentions it.
Who it's competing with
| Product | Launched | Scale (early November, Chrome Web Store) | How it differs from KWScanner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keywords Everywhere | 2015-10 | 1M users, 3.3 rating | Annual-only from $84, credits expire |
| Keyword Surfer | 2019-10 | 600k users, 2.66 rating | Free, funnels users to Surfer SEO |
| Ubersuggest | 2020-05 | 600k users, 4.73 rating | Neil Patel's suite, monthly or lifetime |
| KWS Everywhere | 2024-12 | 9k users, 4.96 rating, flat for 90 days | Nearly identical positioning, sells a time-based unlimited pass |
| Keyword Planner(appvector) | 2024-06 | 3k users | Smaller players in the same category |
| Semrush / Ahrefs | — | From $129/month | Full web suite, expensive |
This is a ten-year-old category, and the top spot has held for ten years. Newcomers can reach about 10k users: KWScanner did it with a single school, and KWS Everywhere, a year and a half earlier, did it on its own, and then both stalled there.
The pricing angle is still unproven
"From $5, pay per use, no expiry" is a real gap. Since Keywords Everywhere switched to annual-only, people have been looking for alternatives; for freelancers in places like Pakistan who bill by project and are price-sensitive, $5 plus 10k free credits is a very low barrier.
But its user count has been stuck between 8k and 9k since early October for a month. If pay-per-use were pulling in people from the public market, the curve should keep rising after students finish installing; it isn't. Revenue and paid conversion have not been published, so from the outside there's no telling how many students actually paid.
If it were you
The short verdict: Don't build yet another keyword extension just by copying this. KWScanner's 9k users and 500 five-star ratings came from a training institute with 20,000 students writing it into its course outline, and you can't get that. Its real product difference (pay per use) has not yet proven itself in the public market. What's worth taking is the playbook: have people first, then build the tool, then make the tool a standard part of the course.
Who it suits: people already running bootcamps, paid courses or paid communities (SEO, cross-border e-commerce, creator education, design, all fine), with hundreds or thousands of students per cohort, and a developer nearby who can write an extension or small tool.
Who it doesn't suit: people who only write code and have no fixed group of users; anyone trying to head-on squeeze another player into the crowded SEO keyword space; anyone counting on "cheaper than the leader" to get users from zero.
How to do it: First look at what your students repeatedly do each week in class, and which expensive, clunky foreign tool they're using to do it. Turn that one task into an extension or web mini-tool, charged per use, or free for students and paid for outsiders. Put it in the course outline and have everyone install it in the first week of the cohort, and use it in assignments. At the same time, copy its public channels: "XX alternative" comparison pages, free single-function lookup pages, backlinks from directory sites, so the tool can be found by search beyond your students.
How to get users: The first batch is your own students, and it costs nothing. Once they're comfortable with the tool, ask them for reviews, spread over several weeks rather than crammed into three days like this one; the store penalizes concentrated review manipulation. Reaching beyond that depends on students bringing it to clients and companies after graduation, plus SEO comparison pages.
When to start: Don't tie it to a fixed date; go with your next cohort's start.
Signs you've misread it: ① Two or three months after students finish, weekly active users drop by more than half, meaning it was just a class assignment, not something people really need at work; ② Three months in, users outside your students haven't grown to even a tenth of your student count, meaning nobody finds it once it's outside the course; ③ Looking back at KWScanner: if by next spring it's still stuck at 9k and the next SEBT cohort produces another jump, that confirms the ceiling of this path is your student count.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Keywords Everywhere Chrome 2015-10 1M users, 5,692 rating, 3.3 stars Annual-only from 2023 ($84/yr and up), credits expire after 12 months; KWScanner is pay-per-use from $5, credits never expire, and it has lists and a batch dashboard Keyword Surfer Chrome 2019-10 600k users, 2.66 rating Free, funnels users to Surfer SEO; KWScanner is paid and has a standalone dashboard Ubersuggest Chrome 2020-05 600k users, 4.73 rating Monthly all-in-one suite; KWScanner is keyword-only with pay-per-use KWS Everywhere Chrome 2024-12 9k users, 229 rating, flat for 90 days Nearly identical positioning, but sells a one-time unlimited pass plus Ahrefs DR; KWScanner counts keywords in credits Keyword Planner(appvector.io) Chrome 2024-06 3k users Similar small player, no training-course distribution channel Google Keyword Planner Big-company features — Free The data source itself, but requires an Ads account and isn't shown in SERPs Semrush / Ahrefs Web — From $129/month+ Suite, expensive; KWScanner has written alternative pages to capture this search traffic - Where users come from
- Verified Its own bootcamp students (iSkills SEBT NEXT): the course outline has "🔍 KWScanner by iSkills"; about two weeks after the 2026-08-22 cohort started, users went from 1k to 3k and reached 8k within a month; Firefox has only 46 users
- Verified Concentrated ratings from students: from 10-24 to 10-27, 414 ratings came in over three days; the latest reviews are all South Asian names, one reads "thanks iskills"; whether the teacher assigned it is unverified
- Verified SEO comparison pages + free tool pages: the website has Keywords Everywhere / Keyword Surfer / Semrush / Ahrefs alternative pages (2026-10-07), plus a keyword-volume lookup tool page and a Claude/MCP page
- Verified Directory and launch sites: SourceForge, Slashdot, Crunchbase, LaunchingPro, TinyLaunch (2026-11-09 launch)
- Verified Facebook page + WhatsApp channel: FB page has 661 followers and an "Introducing KWScanner" video
- Inferred Product Hunt upvote drives / replies under big X accounts: a search snippet reads "please Upvote KWScanner on product hunt", and under a Charles Floate post someone replied "add kwscanner.com"; neither source has been verified
Why KWScanner — Keyword Research Tool (Chrome) took off
Bottom line
KWScanner got going on a ready-made pool of students. It's a keyword tool built by iSkills, an SEO training institute in Pakistan (founder M Tanveer Nandla, who says he has trained over 20k students). iSkills' flagship course, SEBT NEXT, started in 2026-08-22, and its course outline has a section called "🔍 KWScanner by iSkills". Within two weeks of the cohort starting, Chrome users jumped from about 1k to 3k and reached 8k a month later. From October 24 to 27, rating count went from 21 to 435 in three days, and the new reviews are almost all South Asian names, with at least one saying "thanks iskills". On the product side it does have real differences (pay per use, credits that never expire, from $5, aimed squarely at Keywords Everywhere's annual subscription), but this round of growth came mostly from the bootcamp's students, not from winning users off the public market on those differences.
Key facts
- Store: 9,000 users, rating 4.99, rating count 481(11-01) → 499(11-07) (chromestore library item_snap); 2026-05-23 launch, version 1.3.6(2026-11-03), has the Established publisher badge.
- Website kwscanner.com: domain registered 2026-05-03 (Verisign RDAP); Firefox version listed the same day 2026-05-23, with only 46 daily active users and 0 ratings (AMO API, 2026-11-06).
- 90-day curve (extops.dev single page, scraped 2026-11-06):
- Users: 09-01 1k → 09-02 1k → 09-04 3k (published 1.3.1) → 09-07 4k → 09-13 5k → 09-17 6k → 09-26 7k → 10-04 8k → 10-29 9k → flat at 9k since.
- Rating count: 09-01 6 → 10-24 21 → 10-27 435 → 10-29 460 → 11-01 481 → 11-06 493. The average rating moved from 4.71 to 4.99.
- 1.3.1 (09-04) cut permissions from 174 items to 7. The current manifest has about 50
google.xx/search*sites, whereas before it probably listed each Google country domain separately, which doesn't look like a change of owner. This point is an inference.
- Pricing: the website sells credits, 1 credits = 1 keywords. From $0.0005/credit, minimum $5; high volume gets up to 6% off ($200 for 1M credits); credits never expire; sign-up gives 10k credits; the first purchase gets double credits (kwscanner.com homepage and comparison page).
Competitors
| Product | Position | Launched | Scale | How it differs from KWScanner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keywords Everywhere | Chrome / Firefox / Edge | 2015-10 | 1,000,000 users, 5,692 rating, 3.3 stars | Category leader. Data only shown to paying users since 2023-06; now sells annual only (Bronze $84/yr, 100k credits minimum), credits expire after 12 months (official subscriptions page, Capterra reviews). KWScanner's marketing page is written specifically to target it. |
| Keyword Surfer(Surfer) | Chrome | 2019-10 | 600,000 users, rated 2.66 | Mostly free, used as a traffic funnel for Surfer SEO; ratings are very poor. |
| Ubersuggest(Neil Patel) | Chrome | 2020-05 | 600,000 users, rated 4.73 | Monthly / lifetime plans, the feature set is an all-in-one suite. |
| KWS Everywhere(kwseverywhere.com) | Chrome | 2024-12-17 | 9,000 users, 229 rating, 4.96 stars; over the past 90 days it has stayed between 9k and 10k (extops). | Positioning is nearly identical (inline SERP display of volume / CPC / competition), but it sells an 'unlimited pass': pay once, priced by time, plus Ahrefs DR. KWScanner charges per keyword. |
| Keyword Planner(appvector.io) | Chrome | 2024-06 | 3,000 users | Smaller players in the same category |
| Ahrefs SEO Toolbar / Detailed SEO / SEOquake, etc. | Chrome | 2009–2020 | 400k–1M | Focused on on-page SEO and backlinks, not on keyword volume shown in the SERP. |
| Google Keyword Planner | Big-company features | — | — | The data source itself, free, but requires an Ads account and doesn't show on the SERP; KWScanner says its data comes from 'authoritative sources including Google Keyword Planner'. |
| Semrush / Ahrefs | Web | — | From $129/month+ | All-in-one suite. KWScanner has dedicated 'Semrush alternative' and 'Ahrefs alternative' pages that capture this traffic. |
Data from the chromestore library item table (2026-11-07 snapshot) and each vendor's website. This category is a red ocean; the top player has been stable for ten years. Newcomers reaching around 10k users, and both KWScanner and KWS Everywhere are at that level.
Growth tactics (evidence)
- Students from its own training course (main cause, confirmed)
- The SEBT NEXT course page's table of contents has a 'KWScanner by iSkills' section (0/2 lessons), placed after Welcome Note, Join Social Channels and the syllabus, before the main lessons (app.iskills.com/course-detail/sebt-next-1784729567031/46191/; the student watch page has the same section).
- SEBT NEXT registration closes 2026-08-20, orientation starts 2026-08-22 (iskills.com/sebt-syllabus.pdf; FB post 'Start of an Era! iSkills SEBT NEXT 22 August 2026'). The course is in Urdu, 200 hours, paid once for $216; iSkills' site says '12K+ SEBT Learners' and '20,000+ Learners'.
- The timing matches: about two weeks after the cohort started (09-02 to 09-04), users went from 1k to 3k, then grew around 1k a week, and flattened out at 10-04 to 8k, which is what a new cohort installing it looks like.
- The Firefox version has only 46 users versus 9k on Chrome, so there's no sign of organic public growth. If it were spreading through the SEO community on its own, Firefox would not be near zero.
- Concentrated ratings from students (confirmed as students; not yet verified whether it was an assigned task)
- From 10-24 to 10-27, just over three days, 414 ratings came in. The latest 10 reviews on the store page (11-03 to 11-06) are all South Asian names (Madiha Fatima, Aqib Saleem, Hafiz Subhan, Syed Zain ul abideen, etc.), and Shakaib Shah wrote 'unbelivable tool! thanks iskills'. The reviews are short, things like 'Best tool I have ever used' and 'amazing tool'.
- Student watch pages for 10-23 and 10-29 include English sessions, showing classes were running in those days, which overlaps with the rating surge.
- SEO content pages and directory backlinks (confirmed): the site has Keywords Everywhere / Keyword Surfer / Semrush / Ahrefs alternative pages (Exa shows they were published on 2026-10-07), plus a free tool page (/tools/keyword-volume-checker), a 'Claude for SEO' page and an SEO MCP page. The product is listed on SourceForge, Slashdot, Crunchbase, LaunchingPro and TinyLaunch (scheduled for 2026-11-09). This is the same playbook the SEBT course teaches: build small tools to earn backlinks (sebtnext.com module 7, 'Tool development').
- Facebook page + WhatsApp channel (confirmed, small scale): the FB page has 661 followers, with a WhatsApp channel and an 'Introducing KWScanner' video linked.
- Product Hunt vote solicitation (unverified): a search result has a snippet reading 'Sign up on KWScanner.com … please Upvote KWScanner on product hunt', source unconfirmed; no Product Hunt launch page turned up in search.
- Replies under big X accounts (weak evidence): in Google search results, under a Charles Floate post 'THE BEST TOOLS IN SEO', someone replied 'You might want to add kwscanner.com'. The x-radar library returned 0 results for 'kwscanner' over the past 180 days.
- No evidence of paid ads found (not in the chromestore or ad libraries; not finding it doesn't mean it wasn't run).
How many people have seen it
- Revenue isn't public and it isn't on TrustMRR.
- Neither media nor major X accounts have written about it; x-radar shows 0 mentions; Reddit search returns nothing for KWScanner.
- The fact that 'iSkills made it' only shows up in the course table of contents and student reviews; the official site, store pages and About page mention neither iSkills nor Nandla.
- Conclusion: few people know about it yet (almost no public discussion); users are concentrated in the closed circle of iSkills students.
Copycats
Nothing found. The similarly named KWS Everywhere launched a year and a half earlier (2024-12), so this isn't a copycat, just an earlier player in the same category.
Why it took off
- The user base came built-in: the founder already runs one of Pakistan's largest SEO training institutes (tens of thousands of SEBT students). When the new cohort opened, the course table of contents already had a 'KWScanner by iSkills' section, and September alone brought in 7k installs.
- Students drove up the ratings: three days of 414 five-star reviews turned 4.7 stars from 21 ratings into 4.99 stars from 435 ratings. That lifted trust on the store page, which helps conversion from store search later.
- The product targets a real pain point: Keywords Everywhere stopped free data 2023 years ago, sells annual only, and credits expire; people on Reddit and Quora keep asking for alternatives. KWScanner catches them with 'from $5, pay per use, credits never expire, 10k credits on signup'. For a price-sensitive freelance market like Pakistan's, a $5 starting point matters.
- Low data cost: the data is resold from Google Keyword Planner and third-party data vendors, so there's no need to build scrapers or clickstream data. Charging per keyword ties cost to revenue one-to-one.
Differentiation
- Versus Keywords Everywhere: both display inline in the SERP. The difference is in pricing (pay per use, no expiry, from $5, versus their annual plan from $84) and in the workspace (batch lookup of 3,000 keywords, named lists, filtering, CSV/XLSX export, push to Google Ads).
- Versus KWS Everywhere: one charges per keyword, the other sells an unlimited pass by time. Both are aiming at the same point: Keywords Everywhere is too expensive or the metering feels bad.
- Is the differentiation what drove it? Mostly not, for this round of growth. The current 9k users and 499 ratings can be almost entirely attributed to iSkills students (timing of the cohort, content of reviews, Firefox near zero). Per-use pricing is the card it could play to win paying users in the public market (SEO content pages, directories), but there's no evidence yet that the public channel is working: user count has been flat between 8k and 9k for a month.
What others can borrow
- People with an existing audience building tools: training institutes, communities and course creators build their own tools and write them into the course as standard equipment for students. Cold-start installs and ratings come in one go, and the tool builds word of mouth along the way. Chinese bootcamps and paid knowledge communities could do this directly.
- Sell in the gap in the leader's pricing: the leader sells annual only and credits expire, so offer pay-per-use from $5 and capture search traffic with 'XX alternative' comparison pages.
- List on directories + write comparison pages: directories like SourceForge, Slashdot and TinyLaunch, plus competitor alternative pages, are a cheap SEO cold-start.
Still unclear
- Paid conversion and revenue are completely unknown (not public).
- Whether the concentrated ratings at the end of October were an explicit assignment or spontaneous from students: no original course wording was found.
- Where the 1k users before 09-01 came from (possibly staff or past-cohort beta testers): unverified.
- Which data vendor it uses and its gross margin: unverified.
- Whether it ran Meta ads: not found (the ad library only tracks products on its list).
Sources
- chromestore library: item, item_snap (2026-11-01/03/07)
- extops.dev/extensions/ocnmcmajnfmogmkifpknbllpnheoohgp (and /safety), extops.dev/extensions/cnfmojhcmleelapdiapckcdlkgbmdolh
- kwscanner.com, /about/, /keywords-everywhere-alternative/; RDAP rdap.verisign.com (kwscanner.com registered 2026-05-03)
- chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ocnmcmajnfmogmkifpknbllpnheoohgp/reviews (scraped 2026-11-06)
- addons.mozilla.org API: kwscanner-keyword-research (DAU 46)
- app.iskills.com/course-detail/sebt-next-1784729567031/46191/ (the 'KWScanner by iSkills' section in the course table of contents); iskills.com/sebt-syllabus.pdf (2026-08-22 cohort start); iskills.com (student count)
- keywordseverywhere.com/ctl/subscriptions (annual pricing); kwseverywhere.com
- facebook.com/KWScanner (661 followers, WhatsApp channel); tinylaunch.com/launch/24188-kwscanner
- x-radar search for 'kwscanner' over the past 180 days: 0 results