Branch Explorer

About

ChatGPT and Claude already have a powerful branching system built in — every time you edit a past message, it saves the original thread and creates a new one. But navigating these branches means clicking tiny ‹ › arrows buried in each message. You lose track of where you are, and there's no way to see the full picture.
Branch Explorer gives you the map.

🌿 Conversation Sidebar
Every user message in your conversation appears as a clickable list in the sidebar. Scroll the chat and the sidebar highlights your current position automatically. Click any message to jump straight to it.

⑂ Branch Tree — visual overview
Fork points are shown with an expand/collapse toggle. See how many variants exist at each branch, click to navigate between them, and let the sidebar stay in sync with whatever you do in the chat.

📊 Graph View
Switch to the graph view to see your entire conversation as a node tree — parent messages at the top, branches spreading downward. The active path is highlighted in blue. Zoom in and out with the scroll wheel. Click any node to jump to that message.

✂️ Fork from selected text
Select any text in the conversation. ChatGPT's native popup gains a new Fork branch here button alongside Ask ChatGPT. On user messages it triggers the edit flow to create a real branch. On assistant messages it finds the next user message to fork from.

⬇️ Load all branch names
One button visits every variant of every branch in your conversation, reads the message text, and fills in the branch labels throughout the sidebar and graph — so you always know what each branch contains.

🔄 Always in sync
The sidebar and graph update automatically as you chat, navigate branches with the native ‹ › arrows, or switch variants. No manual refresh needed.

No API key. No account changes. No data collection.
Branch Explorer is a pure UI layer on top of chatgpt.com. It reads and annotates ChatGPT's(and Claude's) own interface — your conversations never leave OpenAI's(and Anthropic's) servers. The extension requests only the minimum permissions needed to run on chatgpt.com.
Works on all ChatGPT and Claude plans.