How to summarize any webpage with AI

Why summarize

There's more worth reading than there's time to read it: long reports, news analysis, research write-ups, documentation, newsletters. A short summary tells you whether an article deserves twenty minutes, or gives you the gist when it doesn't. AI models are good at this kind of summary, as long as they get the article's text rather than the whole page around it.

The built-in way

Several browsers and AI services now offer some form of page summary, and the details change often. In Chrome, check the side panel and the address bar for AI features available in your region and on your account. If one is there and you're happy with it, you may not need anything else.

The manual way

The method that works everywhere:

1. Select the article's text, from the headline to the last paragraph, and copy it.
2. Open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini in another tab.
3. Paste the text and ask for "a five-bullet summary".

It works well, with three annoyances. Selecting just the article, without menus, ads and comments, is fiddly on many sites. You switch tabs and lose your place. And you type the same instruction every time. Pasting a link instead of the text sometimes works, and sometimes the assistant can't open the page, especially if it's behind a sign-in.

Make it permanent with a tool

A Summarize button removes the copying and the tab-switching. It's a userscript, a short piece of JavaScript that runs on a site you choose, with one extra step: it calls AI. When you click it, it gathers the article's text from the page, leaving out the navigation and the comments, sends that text to an AI model with your instruction, and shows the answer in a panel beside the article.

ScriptPanda is a Chrome extension that builds tools like this from a plain description, including tools that use AI each time they run. Open its side panel on an article, paste the request at the end of this guide, and it builds the button for that site. You can change the instruction later: three bullets, a single paragraph, the key numbers only, or a summary in another language.

How AI tools work in ScriptPanda

AI tools are different from tools that only change a page, in two ways:

• You approve it first. Before an AI tool runs for the first time, ScriptPanda asks for your approval, because running it sends text from the page to be processed. You can withdraw that approval at any time.
• Each run uses requests. A tool that only hides or rearranges things runs locally for free once it's built. An AI tool uses requests from your plan every time it summarizes, and longer articles use more than short ones.

If an AI tool's call fails, that run isn't charged.

What to send, and what not to

A summary tool sends the article's text, nothing else. Still, think about the pages you use it on. Don't build it into internal pages, private messages or anything with personal data you wouldn't paste into a chatbot yourself.

Limits

The tool summarizes the page open in the tab, when you click the button. It doesn't summarize pages in the background, follow links, or read pages you haven't opened. It sees the text that's on the page, so content behind "Read more", in another tab of the article, or in a PDF viewer may be missed. Very long pages may need to be cut down to fit, and summaries can leave out details or get them wrong, as AI summaries sometimes do, so check anything important against the article. If the site changes its layout and the button picks up the wrong text, open ScriptPanda on the page and ask it to fix the tool.