Published 2026-08-28.
Pasting a URL often isn't enough — the assistant can't open the page.
Hand a chat assistant a link and say "summarize this," and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, it's usually one of three reasons:
- The assistant has no browsing ability, or it's switched off for that conversation
- The page is behind a login — a members-only article, an internal document, an order history
- The site blocks automated access
All three go away if you hand over the text yourself. Here are three ways to do that on an iPhone.
Option 1: Share the URL to the assistant's app
Tap Share in Safari and pick the assistant. Fewest taps of the three.
Where it falls down. All you've handed over is a link, so the three reasons above still apply. If you get "I couldn't load that page," switch to one of the options below.
Option 2: Pull the text out with a Shortcut (free)
- Create a shortcut and turn on Show in Share Sheet
- Add Get Contents of Web Page
- Add Get Text from Rich Text
- Add Copy to Clipboard (or an action from the assistant's own app)
Action names shift slightly between iOS versions.
Where it falls down. "Get Contents of Web Page" extracts the article the same way Safari Reader does. So on pages where Reader doesn't work, you get little or nothing — forums, dashboards, app-like pages, anything built mostly out of tables.
Option 3: Copy what's actually rendered, then paste
A Safari extension can take the text the page is currently drawing and put all of it on your clipboard. I make one of these — Copy All Text — so weigh what follows accordingly.
What it's good at. It works where Reader fails. Lists that scroll inside their own frame, text shortened with an ellipsis, what you typed into fields, and tables (tab-separated, so the structure survives into the chat) all come along.
Where it falls down. No OCR, so text inside images doesn't come. Content embedded from another site doesn't either. Collapsed sections need opening first.
Things that go wrong after you paste
- It's too long to be read in full
- Every assistant has a limit on how much it takes at once. Split a long article in half and say "this is part one, more is coming" before pasting the rest.
- Navigation and footers get mixed in
- Copying a whole page brings the menus along. One line — "summarize the article body only, ignore navigation and footer" — is usually enough to sort it out.
- The table isn't being read as a table
- If it arrived tab-separated, most assistants handle it. If not, say "this is a tab-separated table."
Before you paste
Don't paste pages containing company information or other people's personal data.
Depending on the settings, what you send to a chat assistant may be used for training, and your employer may have rules about moving data to outside services. Check what's actually on the page before it goes anywhere.
Reposting an article's full text publicly is a copyright problem. Keep it to summarizing for your own reading.
For copying in general — not just for AI — see how to copy a whole web page's text on iPhone, which compares four methods with measurements from five real pages.