This comparison originally ran in 2023, when both tools were free and did roughly opposite things. Both have changed since. The most important change is that SEO Minion is no longer a free standalone extension, which is the thing most people arriving at this page are trying to find out.
Updated September 2026.
The short answer
They are not really competitors any more, and for most people they never were.
SEO Minion inspects the page in front of you. Titles, headings, links, hreflang, structured data, what the SERP looks like from another country. It reports facts. It does not write anything.
Harpa AI is a browser agent. It reads the page and hands it to a language model, then summarizes, drafts, extracts or automates. It generates things. It does not audit anything reliably.
If you need to know what is wrong with a page, that is SEO Minion. If you need to produce something from a page, that is Harpa. Wanting both is normal. Choosing between them usually means you have not decided which problem you have.
What changed since 2023
SEO Minion went paid. It is now available only to Keywords Everywhere customers on the Silver plan or above. There is no free tier of the extension itself any more. If you remember installing it for nothing and are wondering why it is asking for a subscription, that is why.
This matters more than it sounds. SEO Minion's appeal was never that it was the most capable auditor. It was that it was free, instant, and good enough for a spot check. Behind a subscription it now competes with tools that do considerably more for similar money.
Harpa grew up into an agent. In 2023 it was a ChatGPT sidebar that could read the page. It now runs multi-step automations, scheduled commands, page monitoring and web scraping, across a menu of models rather than one. It is a meaningfully different product from the one this post originally described.
Is Harpa AI safe
This is the question people actually search, so here is a straight answer.
Harpa is a browser extension with permission to read the pages you visit. That is not a flaw, it is how it works. Any extension of this type, including SEO Minion, needs that access to do anything useful. The question is not whether it can see your pages. It is what you are comfortable having it see.
The practical considerations:
- It reads whatever tab you invoke it on, including pages you are logged into. Your webmail, your bank, your client's admin panel. It acts when you invoke it, but the permission is standing.
- Cloud models mean your page content leaves your machine. Harpa states that data sent to its cloud models is not stored or used for training. You are still trusting that statement, as you are with every hosted AI tool.
- There is a bring-your-own-key option on the lifetime plan, which routes requests through your own provider account instead. If your concern is where the text goes, that is the meaningful control.
- It is a small company's extension, not enterprise software. Extensions change hands. An extension you trust today is owned by whoever buys it tomorrow, and it keeps its permissions.
My own rule, which is not specific to Harpa: no page-reading extension stays enabled in the browser profile I use for client accounts. It lives in a separate profile with nothing sensitive signed in. That takes two minutes to set up and removes the entire category of worry.
If you handle regulated data, ask your compliance people rather than a blog post.
What each is genuinely good at
SEO Minion earns its place for:
- Checking a page's title, meta description, canonical and robots directives without opening dev tools.
- Highlighting internal versus external and follow versus nofollow links visually. Faster than any other method for understanding how a page links out.
- hreflang validation, which is tedious to do any other way and easy to get wrong.
- Seeing search results as they appear in another country or city.
- Comparing rendered DOM against raw HTML on JavaScript-heavy sites, which is how you catch content Google may not be seeing.
Harpa earns its place for:
- Summarizing something long when you need the gist and not the document.
- Drafting from a page you are looking at: an outline, a reply, a description.
- Pulling structured data off a page into a table without writing a scraper.
- Repetitive browser work you would otherwise do by hand thirty times.
Where they overlap, and it is less than it looks
Both can pull People Also Ask questions. Both touch SERP data. In practice the overlap is one feature wide, and each does it in a way that suits a different workflow: SEO Minion gives you the raw list, Harpa gives you something already shaped into an outline.
That is the whole overlap. Everything else is separate.
What they cost
Harpa, at the time of writing: $12 a month billed annually for the entry plan, $19 a month for the tier that includes scheduled commands and advanced automation, or a $240 one-time lifetime license with a smaller token allowance and the option to use your own API keys. Model access includes the current frontier models rather than one fixed provider.
SEO Minion: no standalone price. It requires a Keywords Everywhere subscription at Silver or above, billed annually. Check their pricing page for the current figure, since it has moved.
Both change their pricing. Verify before you buy.
Which should you pay for
Pay for SEO Minion if you audit pages regularly and you were going to buy Keywords Everywhere anyway. As a bundled extra it is good value. As the reason to start a subscription, it is a harder case than it was when it was free, and free alternatives now cover a decent share of what it does.
Pay for Harpa if you have identified a repetitive browser task that takes you real hours. That is the case where it pays back quickly and obviously. If you just want an AI sidebar, your browser probably has one now and it costs nothing.
Pay for neither if you are not sure which of your problems either one solves. Both are tools for people who already know what they are trying to do faster.
The honest summary
Two good tools, aimed at different halves of the job, that briefly looked like alternatives because they installed the same way. SEO Minion tells you what is there. Harpa makes something new out of it. Neither replaces the other, and the change worth knowing in 2026 is that the free one is not free any more.