Skin cancer (SC) is a highly serious kind of cancer that, if not addressed swiftly, might result in the patient’s demise. Early detection of this condition allows for more effective therapy and prevents disease development. Deep Learning (DL) approaches may be used as an effective and efficient tool for SC detection (SCD). Several DL-based algorithms for automated SCD have been reported. However, more efficient models are needed to improve accuracy. As a result, this paper introduces a new strategy for SCD based on Grey Wolf optimization (GWO) methodologies and CNN. The proposed methodology has four stages: preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification. The proposed method utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract features from Regions of Interest (ROIs). CNN is employed for feature categorization, whereas the GWO approach enhances accuracy by refining edge detection and segmentation. This technique utilizes a probabilistic model to accelerate the convergence of the GWO algorithm. Employing the GWO model to optimize the structure and weight vectors of CNNs can enhance diagnostic accuracy by a minimum of 5%, based on evaluation outcomes. The application of the proposed strategy and its performance comparison with other methods indicate that the proposed method with GWO predicted SC with an average accuracy of 95.11% and without GWO an Accuracy of 92.66%, respectively, enhancing accuracy by a minimum of 2.5% when we train our model with GWO.