the-gist

About

See past the clickbait — before you click.

Most "summary" extensions analyze articles you've already opened. By then, the bait already worked. the-gist flips that around: right-click any link and get a summary plus a clickbait verdict, BEFORE you commit to opening it.

What makes this different from a regular summarizer is anchor-text-aware clickbait detection. The extension compares the link text on the source page (the actual bait) against the destination's real content. A headline like "you won't believe which beloved club just closed" gets a red verdict even if the article behind it is perfectly good journalism — because the bait is the withholding, not the article.

▸ TWO PATTERNS THE EXTENSION CATCHES

• Curiosity gap — anchor deliberately hides the specific name, place, or finding. ("The TV show everyone's calling 'unmissable'" — which one?)
• Overpromise — emotional or sensational framing where the body underdelivers.

▸ HOW YOU USE IT

• Right-click any link → "gist this link" → fetched, summarized, and color-graded (green = legit / red = clickbait) without leaving your current page.
• Optional: auto-summarize every page you visit (off by default).
• Optional: full-page brutalist takeover for clickbait pages — the original page is preserved underneath; "see the original anyway" restores it.

▸ THREE AI PROVIDERS, YOUR CHOICE

• OpenAI — GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1-mini, GPT-4o
• Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5
• Chrome AI — built-in Gemini Nano, runs locally on your device. Free, no API key, fully private.

Bring your own API key for OpenAI / Anthropic. Chrome AI needs no setup beyond a feature flag.

▸ PRIVACY

• API keys live in chrome.storage.sync, only sent to the provider's API.
• Page content is sent only to your chosen LLM provider — nowhere else. Chrome AI keeps everything on-device.
• No analytics, no telemetry, no third-party services.
• Skip-list ensures sensitive sites (Gmail, GitHub, Slack, ChatGPT, etc.) are never analyzed.
• The last 100 gists are stored locally (chrome.storage.local) — never synced.

▸ MORE

• Multi-language: works in any language; RTL detection for Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, etc.
• Movable, collapsible panels.
• Built-in gist history viewer in settings.
• A typical gist costs less than a cent at the default models. Repeat views hit a 1-hour cache and cost nothing.

Source code (open source): https://github.com/baruchih/the-gist