Paste any web article link and get the key points in seconds — perfect for research, news and long reads you don't have time for.
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Long articles distilled to the points that matter, so you can decide if it's worth a full read.
Summarize sources fast while gathering material — then cite them with the Citation Generator.
Compare multiple articles side by side and read past common paywalls — on Pro.
A URL summarizer takes a link to a web article and hands back the substance — the argument, the findings, the numbers — without the 2,000-word build-up. You paste an address instead of pasting text, which matters more than it sounds: with a long read you'd otherwise have to open the page, scroll to find the body, select around the sidebar and footer, and copy it across. Here the tool does the fetching and the trimming. You stay on this page and read the result.
It's most useful when the answer to "is this worth my time?" costs you ten minutes to find out. Triaging a stack of search results, skimming a report someone forwarded, catching up on a thread of news coverage — these are the moments where a summary that lands in a few seconds saves a real chunk of an afternoon. It isn't a replacement for reading the source when the source matters; it's a way to decide which sources matter.
When you hit Summarize, the tool requests the page and then has to find the article inside it. A typical web page is mostly not the article — there's a header, a navigation bar, a cookie banner, related-post rails, comment threads and ads wrapped around the part you actually came for. So the first real job is extraction: isolating the main body text and discarding the chrome. Get that wrong and you summarize the menu instead of the story, which is why clean extraction does most of the heavy lifting before any summarizing begins.
Once the body is clean, the text is condensed into the format you picked — tight key points, or a short paragraph. Key points is the right default when you want to scan: each line stands on its own, so you can read three bullets and stop. Short is better when you want a sentence or two you could drop into notes or a message. Either way the model is working from the article's own wording, pulling the load-bearing claims to the front rather than inventing a take on them.
The tool doesn't care what kind of article it is, but in practice a few patterns come up again and again:
Anything that's mostly readable text on a public page is fair game: news articles, blog posts, essays, documentation, long-form explainers. The more the page is built around prose, the better the result, because there's more for the extractor to work with. A dense 3,000-word feature condenses cleanly; a one-line page or a list of links doesn't have a "gist" to pull.
The honest limits are worth knowing up front. Pages that are mostly video, images or an interactive app give the tool almost no text, so the summary will be thin. Sites that block automated requests, or hide the article behind a login or paywall, may return little or nothing — reading past common paywalls is a Pro feature, and the free tool works on openly accessible pages. And like any summary, it can only reflect what the article says; if the source is wrong, the summary will faithfully repeat the error. For claims that matter, treat the summary as a fast map and follow the link to the source.
Read the key points as a table of contents rather than a verdict. They tell you what the article covers and roughly where it lands, which is usually enough to decide whether to open the full piece or move on. If a summary feels oddly generic for a page you expected to be meaty, that's often a sign the extractor struggled — a heavy paywall, a script-rendered page, or a layout where the real text is buried — rather than the article being empty.
Two small habits make it noticeably better. First, paste the URL of the article itself, not a search-results page, a category index or a homepage — those have no single body to summarize, so you'll get a muddle. Second, when you're researching, summarize and cite in the same sweep: get the gist here, then send the link to the Citation Generator for a clean APA, MLA or Harvard reference while it's still in front of you. For video and slide decks instead of articles, the YouTube Summarizer and PDF Summarizer take the same approach to those formats.
Generate an APA, MLA or Harvard reference in one click.
Citation Generator