A Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT last week asked “what AI extensions do you actually keep installed?” and out of 400+ comments, most people listed extensions they tried and uninstalled within a week. I spent the better part of February testing 20 AI Chrome extensions. And the honest takeaway is that most of them solve problems I do not have.

The copy-paste layer

About half the extensions do the same thing. They add a sidebar that connects to an LLM and let you highlight text to send it to the model. Sider, Merlin, Monica, MaxAI — they all land in this bucket. Sider has a floating toolbar. Monica uses a command bar. MaxAI does a right-click menu. But the core interaction is identical: select text, send to AI, read response, manually do something with it.

And they all cost between $10-20 per month on top of whatever you’re already paying for AI.

I kept Sider installed the longest because its summarization is fast and querying a PDF in-browser saved me real time during a rabbit hole about EU AI Act compliance documents. But I never once felt like it changed how I work. So it became another tab in a workflow that already has too many.

Too many features, not enough point

Harpa AI is the strangest thing I installed. It tries to be a browser automation tool, a writing assistant, a web scraper, a competitor monitoring service, and a YouTube summarizer all at once. The prompt library has hundreds of templates organized by use case, and navigating it feels like browsing the menu at a restaurant with 200 items where you know the kitchen is just microwaving everything from the same freezer.

Some automation features partially worked. But they broke on dynamically loaded pages and anything requiring authentication, and I spent more time debugging the tool than doing anything productive.

Jasper’s extension is a different animal. Optimized for marketing copy, plugs into Google Docs and social platforms. But for anyone not writing ad copy 8 hours a day it’s an expensive autocomplete that inserts “unlock the power of” into your LinkedIn posts.

What survived the purge

Three extensions made it.

Perplexity’s is excellent for research. It cites sources inline and the answers stay grounded. So I use it almost daily for questions that would otherwise become a 6-tab search spiral. The quality difference between Perplexity’s cited answers and a generic ChatGPT response is large enough that I stopped using ChatGPT entirely for factual lookups, which is something I did not expect going into this.

Grammarly’s AI rewrite features have gotten surprisingly good. And since I already pay for Pro, the additions feel like a natural expansion rather than a separate product I need to rationalize. The tone-matching specifically works better than any standalone AI writing tool I tested, probably because Grammarly has years of data on how people actually write versus how they want to write.

And then dassi. Because it can see the page I’m on and interact with it directly, tasks like drafting emails, filling forms, and pulling data from web apps happen without the copy-paste relay that every other extension on this list still requires. You can log in with your ChatGPT subscription now too, so the API key setup that used to gate the experience is gone. And yes, I realize saying this on the dassi blog is suspect, but the gap between “query AI about a page” and “AI works on the page alongside you” was the single biggest functional difference I found across all 20 extensions.

Seventeen out of twenty

Wrappers. A Google VP recently said the quiet part out loud about this category’s life expectancy.

So what actually lasts

Google is already building Gemini natively into Chrome. And OpenAI ships its own extension. So every third-party extension charging $15/month to pipe highlighted text to an API is operating on a clock that is not slowing down.

The extensions that survive will do something the base model cannot do alone. See the page. Navigate it. Act on it. Everything else is a nicer damn text box.