Memex Guide

Welcome

Memex sits on top of Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. It runs entirely in your browser as an extension. Three things to know up front:

• Memex remembers your past chats locally. Conversations from every supported AI are indexed in your browser's storage on this device.
• Provider tabs everywhere. The popup, the in-page panel, search and groups all expose an All / Claude / ChatGPT / Perplexity tab strip so you can scope what you're looking at. See Multi-AI workflow for the rules.
• AI features are opt-in and gated. Sorting, summarising and Ask Memex send conversation content to the Memex server (which calls Claude on your behalf). The rest — searching, grouping, tagging — never leaves your machine.

Install & first run

From zero to your first sorted dashboard.

1. Install the extension (Firefox or Chrome).
2. Pin the extension icon in the toolbar so you can reach it quickly.
3. Click the Memex icon — you'll be guided through choosing your primary AI (Claude / ChatGPT / Perplexity), logging in, and an optional one-shot sort.
4. Open your AI in a tab (claude.ai, chatgpt.com, or perplexity.ai). Memex indexes your conversations automatically — you'll see "Indexing your conversations…" for a few seconds.

The dashboard

What you see when you click the Memex icon.

The popup is organised into expandable sections:

• ✨ Ask Memex — natural-language Q&A across every indexed conversation. See Ask Memex.
• Active session — conversations you're currently working with. See Active session.
• Favorites — conversations you starred (★).
• Prompts — reusable prompt snippets and chains.
• Tags — every tag you've applied; clicking one filters.
• My Groups — thematic groups created when you run a sort.

Above the conversation list sits the chip-and-Select row: ☑ Select, time filters, and a clear-filters button when any are active.

Group cards carry four right-side icons (in order): ⤵ nest (move under another group), ↗ Export (Markdown / PDF / Notion picker), ⋯ (overflow: rename, merge), ✕ (delete group — conversations move back to ungrouped).

Every conversation row has icons on the right: drag handle, group-move ⇄, hide ⊘, delete ✕. Double-click a group title to rename in place; double-click the emoji to change it.

In-page panel & button

What Memex shows inside your AI's site.

Beyond the toolbar popup, Memex injects two things on every supported AI conversation page (claude.ai, chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai). The panel is identical across the three providers — same width, same sub-views, same actions — so muscle memory transfers.

The Memex button on conversation rows

Hover any conversation in your AI's left-hand list. A small Memex icon appears on the row — click it to open a per-conversation control panel with: add tags, edit note, favorite, hide, summarize, add to active session.

The Memex side panel

Open it with the keyboard shortcut (default Ctrl + Alt + W — configurable in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts) or by clicking the Memex floating button on the conversation page. The side panel includes:

• Search across every indexed conversation (same engine as the popup).
• Find in conversation entry — same as Alt + F.
• Prompts — paste a saved prompt into the chat input with one click.
• Active session — quick switch between the conversations you're working with.
• Quick summary of the current conversation (Premium).

Press Esc to close. Arrow keys navigate between controls when the panel has focus.

Multi-AI workflow

How Memex juggles Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity at the same time.

Memex treats each supported AI as a distinct provider and keeps their conversations cleanly separated — a Claude chat and a ChatGPT chat never get mixed up, even when they share a similar title.

Provider tabs

Every list surface — popup dashboard, in-page Session, Favorites, Groups, and the search overlay — has the same tab strip at the top: All / Claude / ChatGPT / Perplexity. They all default to All, so you search and browse your whole library across every AI from anywhere. The tab is a filter: it doesn't move data, it just narrows the view to one provider. Switch tabs freely, your storage stays intact.

What stays tied to the host AI

Browsing and searching are cross-AI, but indexing new conversations still needs the host AI's own signed-in session: on chatgpt.com Memex can only capture ChatGPT convs, on claude.ai only Claude, and so on. If you're signed into Memex but not into the AI you're viewing, you can still browse and search everything already indexed — there's just nothing new to capture until you sign in to that AI.

Cross-AI safety prompts

• Add to session / Favorites after switching tabs. If you'd switched the panel's tab to Claude while on chatgpt.com and then add the current conversation, Memex snaps the tab back to ChatGPT after writing so the just-added conv is actually visible. No silent failure.
• Add to a foreign-AI group. If you try to add a ChatGPT conv to a group whose other members are all Claude (or vice versa), Memex pops a confirm: "You're viewing Claude groups, but this is a ChatGPT conversation. Continue?" The popup's drag-and-drop and move-dropdown apply the same guard.

Popup access from any page

Once you're logged in, the popup is usable from any tab — a GitHub page, a random article, anywhere. It falls back to a provider-agnostic view (All tab) so you can still search, open saved convs, manage groups, and run an Ask Memex query without having to navigate back to your AI first.

Unfiled-conversation toast

When you visit a conv that isn't filed into any group yet, Memex shows a small toast asking which group it belongs in, with a quick picker of your existing groups. Mute in Settings → Toasts.

Sort into groups

Let Claude cluster your chats by topic — and what to do with the groups after.

Running a sort

Click ↺ Re-sort at the bottom of the popup. Memex sends the titles (and short snippets, if deep indexing is on) to Claude Sonnet, which proposes 3-7 thematic groups. You confirm each group's name and emoji before it's saved.

• Free plan: one trial sort, ever.
• Premium: a daily sort allowance that refreshes on a 24-hour rolling window — Starter, Pro and Power get progressively more per day (see the Premium table). The counter under the Re-sort button shows your remaining sorts and the exact time it'll reset.

Managing groups

• Reorder: drag the handle on the left of a group card.
• Rename: double-click the group title.
• Change emoji: double-click the emoji.
• Move a conversation: click the ⇄ icon on a row, then pick the destination group.
• Add an empty group: + Add group below the list.
• Delete: ✕ on the group card; conversations inside go back to ungrouped.

Groups also accept manual additions — open a group and use + Add conversation to pick from your indexed list.

Free plans can create up to 5 groups; Starter raises the cap to 20, and Pro and Power are unlimited (see the Premium table).

Search your history

Find any past conversation by title, keyword, tag, or content.

The search bar at the top of the popup (also reachable via the conversation-page side panel) searches:

• Titles — always.
• Keywords & topics — extracted on index.
• Tags & notes — what you've added.
• Conversation bodies — only if deep indexing is on (Settings → Indexing).

Results are ranked by how well they match: tags count for a lot, title matches rank high, and more recent conversations get a nudge. Synonyms are handled too — searching for bug also catches "error", "crash", "issue", etc.

Search is cross-AI: the overlay (popup and in-page) opens on the All tab and matches across Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity at once. Each result carries a small provider chip, and you can pick a provider tab to narrow the results to one AI.

Filter chips & Select mode

Narrow the dashboard to just what matters — or enter Select mode to operate on many conversations at once.

The row above the conversation list holds two kinds of controls:

• ☑ Select — the toggle for bulk actions. When on, the button reads "☑ Selecting…" and clicks on conversation titles add to the selection instead of opening the conversation.
• Today — conversations first indexed today (local time).
• This week — anything from the last 7 days.
• Has summary — only conversations you've already summarised. Useful for picking up where you left off on big topics.
• Tagged — conversations that carry at least one tag.

Chips stack (AND together) and persist across popup re-opens. When at least one is active, a ✕ Clear filters button appears at the end of the row — one click resets every chip.

Ask Memex

Natural-language question answering across every conversation you've ever had.

The ✨ Ask Memex card at the top of the popup opens an input where you can ask a real question — "what was that book recommendation from last week?", "what did we decide about the kitchen layout?", "summarise everything I've discussed about my trip planning".

How it works:

• Memex builds a private search index of your conversations on its server so it can find the relevant ones. The original text isn't kept in readable form.
• When you ask, Memex finds the most relevant conversations and asks Claude to answer using only those, with citations linking back to each source conversation.
• Clicking a citation jumps you straight to that conversation in Claude.

Quota depends on your plan — Free gets a one-time lifetime allowance to try it; paid plans reset every 24 hours (Starter, Pro, then Power get progressively more per day). The counter is shown under the input. Each ask uses one slot from the rolling 24h window — when you spend your first one of the day, that's the moment the window opens, and it resets exactly 24h later (not at midnight). See the Premium table for the exact numbers.

No match, no charge. If a question turns up no relevant conversations, Memex refunds the slot — you're only charged for asks that actually search your library and reach Claude. Asking when you have nothing indexed yet costs nothing.

Find inside a conversation

Browser-style find, scoped to the open Claude chat.

On any Claude conversation page, press Alt + F (configurable in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts). A slim find bar appears at the top — type to match, Enter or the ↓ arrow to step through hits, Esc to close. It searches every visible bubble (both your messages and Claude's), highlighting in place.

Tags & notes

Hand-curated labels that supercharge search, plus a free-form note per conversation.

Tags

On any conversation card click the 🏷 icon to add tags. Tags appear as pills on the card and as filter chips in the Tags section. Search ranking gives them a huge boost — a conversation tagged stripe always surfaces above one that just happens to mention Stripe in its title.

Notes

Same 🏷 menu — write a short free-form note (e.g. "waiting on customer reply", "main reference for the deploy"). Notes are displayed under the title in the popup card, included in search (a query word inside the note surfaces the conversation), and synced across devices.

Summaries

Two-sentence recap of any past conversation.

From any conversation card (or from inside a Claude chat, via the side panel), click Summarize. Memex sends the conversation to Claude Haiku and shows a 2-3 sentence recap. The summary is stored on the conversation and reused next time.

• A daily summary allowance that refreshes every 24 hours. How many you get scales with your plan — Starter, Pro and Power each get more per day (see the Premium table). The window starts the moment you spend your first summary of the day — it doesn't reset at midnight. The "X of N left" line under the summary panel updates the moment your summary lands.
• The summary panel has a → Use in new chat button to inject it as context.
• ↻ Regenerate is available next to any summary — same quota cost as a fresh generation.

Bulk actions

Operate on many conversations at once instead of one row at a time.

Above the conversation list, click ☑ Select. The button switches to "☑ Selecting…" and a floating bulk-bar appears with two rows:

• Row 1: a count ("3 selected") and a Done button that exits the mode.
• Row 2: the actions — 📁 Move, 🏷 Tag, ⊘ Hide, ✕ Delete. They stay disabled until you've selected at least one conversation.

While the toggle is on, every click on a conversation title adds it to (or removes it from) the selection instead of opening it. Click Done in the bulk-bar (or the ☑ Selecting… button) to exit — clicks open conversations normally again.

• 📁 Move — pick a destination group; every selected conversation moves there.
• 🏷 Tag — type a tag once; it's applied to every selected conversation.
• ⊘ Hide — hide every selected conversation from the dashboard (toggle visibility from Settings → Privacy).
• ✕ Delete — permanently delete every selected conversation from Memex (asks for confirmation).

Sub-groups

Nest a group one level deep under another.

Click ⤵ in a group's actions to nest it — a picker appears with every other top-level group, and the one you choose becomes the parent. Nested groups render indented under the parent and inherit the parent's accent. To un-nest, click ⤴ on the child.

Two-level cap on purpose: Work → Project A is supported, but Work → Project A → Sub-A is not — chains beyond one level are flattened on render. The visual hierarchy stays readable at popup-window size that way.

You can also create a child directly: + Sub-group in the footer of a top-level group creates an empty new child group under it.

Nesting is a Premium feature. Free plans keep a flat list of groups; any paid plan (Starter, Pro, Power) unlocks nesting.

Active session & pins

Save what you're working on now; restore it later.

Click the ⚡ icon on any conversation to pin it to the active session. The session is cross-AI — pin Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity convs into the same set. When you close an AI and reopen it, the Welcome back toast offers to reopen the session's pinned conversations (grouped by AI when more than one provider is in play).

Sessions stay until you explicitly clear them. The session only ever holds what you pinned with ⚡ — never an auto-captured snapshot of your open tabs. Clear it from Privacy → Clear indexed data, or remove individual entries from the dashboard.

Message pins

Inside a conversation, hover any message (yours or the AI's) and click the 📌 to pin that exact turn. Pinned messages show up in the in-page panel so you can jump straight back to the key moments of a long thread. The number of pins per conversation is capped by plan — Free gets a small taste, paid tiers raise it (Power is unlimited). See the Premium table for exact numbers.

Toasts

Little floating cards that surface relevant context while you type.

Memex shows four kinds of toast on a conversation page (Claude / ChatGPT / Perplexity — every provider gets the same surface). Each can be toggled independently in Settings → Toasts. Position (corner) and duration are configurable too.

Similar conversation

As you type a new message, Memex checks whether you've discussed the topic before. If a closely-related past conversation exists, a toast slides in with the title and a link — click to jump to that conversation, or dismiss with ✕.

Long conversation

When a chat gets long, Memex suggests starting a fresh chat with a summary of the current one as context — long contexts slow the AI down and burn more credits per turn.

"Long" is measured by your own messages — only the turns you send count, not the AI's replies. The cutoff defaults to 20 of your messages and is adjustable in Settings → Toasts → Warn after this many of your messages (anywhere from 2 to 200). The same number drives both triggers below.

The toast fires in two situations:

• On arrival — when you click into an existing long conversation, the toast appears within ~2 seconds. (Useful when you reopen a chat after a break.)
• On send — if you cross the threshold mid-conversation, the toast appears shortly after your send completes.

Dismissable per chat (the toast won't show again for that conversation), or globally muted in Settings → Toasts.

Welcome back

When you close and later reopen an AI, Memex offers to reopen that session's active conversations — the ones you pinned with ⚡. There's no time threshold: the trigger is simply closing the AI's last tab and opening it again.

The trigger is per-AI. Closing Claude arms Claude's prompt even while ChatGPT or Perplexity stay open — reopen Claude and you'll be asked to restore Claude's session independently.

If your active session spans more than one AI, the toast shows a Reopen active ▾ dropdown: Open all (N) plus a per-AI row (🟠 Claude, 🟢 ChatGPT, 🔵 Perplexity) with each AI's count, so you can restore everything or just one provider. With a single AI pinned it's a one-click button. Toggle the whole prompt off in Settings → Toasts.

Unfiled conversation

On a conversation that isn't in any group yet, Memex shows a small toast asking where it belongs. The picker lists your existing groups (with provider chips so you can avoid mixing AIs); pick one or create a new group inline.

Tuning

• Position: top-right, bottom-right, top-left, bottom-left.
• Duration: 4s, 8s (default), 12s, or sticky until dismissed.
• Per-type on/off: each toast can be silenced independently — handy for the similar-conv one if you find it noisy.

Prompts & chains

Saved snippets you can paste into any AI chat with one click.

Prompts

Under the Prompts section in the dashboard (and in the in-page side panel), save reusable snippets — a code-review checklist, a writing style guide, a debug template. Tag them, search them, paste them into Claude's input with one click.

Prompt chains

A chain is an ordered sequence of prompts you fire one after the other. Use it for multi-step workflows: e.g. “Extract → analyse → summarise”. Each step's output feeds into the next prompt's context by hand (you advance the chain by clicking).

Prompts and chains sync across all your devices.

Keyboard shortcuts

All shortcuts are customisable in Settings → Keyboard shortcuts.

• Ctrl + Alt + Q (default) — open the Memex popup.
• Ctrl + Alt + W (default) — open the in-page Memex side panel.
• Ctrl + Shift + F (default) — open the search-conversations overlay.
• Alt + F (default) — find inside the current conversation (toggles the find bar open/closed).
• Esc — close any open Memex overlay (find bar, panel, toast).
• ↑ / ↓ — navigate matches in the find bar; navigate controls inside the side panel.
• Enter — submit forms; jump to next match in the find bar.

If a shortcut conflicts with another extension (or with Firefox itself), rebind it: Settings → Keyboard shortcuts → click the field → press the new combo.

Sync & export

Move your data between devices, or take it with you.

Sync

While logged in, Memex syncs the following across all your devices:

• Tags, notes, favorites, groups, prompts, prompt chains
• Hidden / pinned conversations
• Most settings (theme, toast prefs, keyboard shortcuts, indexing options)

Conversation contents (titles, bodies, snippets) are not synced — each device indexes its own from your AI account. This keeps the server-side data minimal and means conversation text never leaves your browser unless you explicitly use an AI feature (sort / summarize / Ask Memex).

Multi-account scoping: if you sign into more than one Claude account on the same machine, groups and tags created under account A stay invisible when you switch to account B. This happens automatically — there's nothing to configure.

Export — everything

Bottom of the dashboard → format buttons (also under Settings → Export):

• 📄 MD — Markdown bundle, one section per conversation.
• 📃 Text — plain-text dump.
• 🧾 JSON — full structured data including tags, notes, groups.
• 🖨 PDF — opens a printable page with an inline "Save as PDF" button.
• ⬢ Notion — pushes everything to a Notion page in your workspace. See Notion integration for the one-time connect flow.

Export — one group at a time

Every group card has an ↗ Export button that opens a small dropdown with three formats scoped to that group: 📄 Markdown, 🖨 PDF, and ⬢ Notion. Handy when you only want to share or archive a single topic without bundling the rest.

Notion export & integration

One-click push of any group (or your whole index) into a Notion page.

Connecting

Settings → Export → Notion integration → Connect to Notion. A Notion authorisation page opens in a new tab — pick the workspace and, crucially, on the "Select pages" screen actually choose at least one destination page (or grant whole-workspace access). Then approve.

The tab returns with a confirmation; back in the popup, Settings → Export → Notion integration now shows "Connected to Notion."

Memex stores only the secure access token needed to create pages. It reads your shared pages only to list them as export destinations — it never reads their contents.

Exporting

• Whole index: dashboard bottom row → Notion, or Settings → Export → Notion.
• Single group: the group's ↗ Export button → ⬢ Notion.

The dropdown row will read "⬢ Notion (coming soon)" if the server isn't configured yet, or "⬢ Notion (connect first)" if you haven't connected Notion yet — clicking either still works (a modal explains what's missing and offers a shortcut to Settings).

You choose where it lands. When more than one Notion page is shared with Memex, a "Export to which Notion page?" picker appears so you can select the destination — Memex creates a new page inside the one you pick. If only a single page is shared, it's used automatically.

Each conversation becomes a heading-2 block with its URL, tags, and (if present) summary. A divider separates each one. The new Notion page opens automatically in a new tab on success.

Limits

• Up to ~25 conversations per export (Notion caps the page block count). Larger groups get truncated — split them into sub-groups and export each.
• Memex can only write to pages you've shared with it. If no pages are accessible and the export fails with "Memex has no page to write to", see the section below.

"Memex has no page to write to" — what to do

This is Notion's permission model, not a Memex bug. Notion integrations can only write to pages the user has explicitly shared with them. Newly created pages are not automatically accessible. Two ways to fix:

1. Fastest: in Notion, open the page where you want exports to land → click ⋯ at the top right → Connections → Add connections → search "Memex" → add. Then retry the export.
2. Cleaner: in Memex Settings → Export → Disconnect, then Connect to Notion again. This time on the "Select pages" screen, pick at least one page (or grant whole-workspace access).

Disconnecting

Settings → Export → Disconnect. Removes Memex's stored token; Notion no longer accepts writes from us. You can also revoke from Notion's own Connections settings on each page.

Settings reference

Every toggle in the gear menu, briefly.

• 🎨 Theme — dark, light, auto.
• 👤 Account — your plan, refresh subscription, change email, change password, log out, delete account.
• 🤖 AI — pick which AI Memex is wired up to.
• 🔔 Toasts — independently toggle the four in-page toasts (similar conversation, long conversation, welcome back, unfiled conversation); set their corner position and duration.
• 🗂 Indexing — cap on indexed conversations, deep indexing, re-index now. (Re-indexing runs automatically whenever you change a setting.)
• ⌨ Keyboard shortcuts — popup, side panel, find-in-conversation.
• 📤 Export — same buttons as the dashboard bottom row (Markdown / Text / JSON / PDF / Notion), plus the Notion Connect / Disconnect controls.
• 🔒 Privacy — clear indexed data; clear everything.

Memex Premium

Three tiers, pick the one that fits how you use AI every day.

Memex has a generous free tier and three paid plans:

Buying / managing

Get Premium from Settings → Account, or from any Premium-gated control (Re-sort, Ask Memex, summaries…). Each tier card opens Stripe Checkout for that plan.

Once subscribed, the same area shows Manage subscription (Stripe billing portal: change card, switch plan, cancel, view invoices), and a ↻ refresh button to re-pull plan status if something looks stale.

Cancelled subscriptions keep their tier until the period end — the badge changes to Pro · ends MMM DD (or whichever tier you were on).

Account management

Settings → Account.

Login & signup

Email + password. After signup you get a confirmation email — clicking its link returns you to the popup with the session active. Saved emails appear as one-tap chips on the login form.

Log out

Signs you out on this device but keeps your indexed data and settings. Logging back in restores everything — your synced data is still tied to your account.

Switch accounts

Log out → log in (or sign up) as another user. The popup detects the account change and resets the local trial flag so you don't get re-offered the free trial sort on the new account.

Delete account

Settings → Account → Delete account. This:

• Cancels your Stripe subscription (if you have one).
• Removes your sync data on the server.
• Signs you out on this device.
• Keeps the locally-indexed conversations on your device — use Settings → Privacy → Clear everything to wipe those too.

Privacy & data

What's stored where.

On your device (in your browser)

• Conversation titles, snippets, keywords, and (if deep indexing is on) full text.
• Tags, notes, groups, favorites, prompts.

On the Memex server

• Your account: email, plan, daily quota counters.
• Sync snapshot: tags, notes, groups, prompts — not conversation contents.
• For AI features only: the specific text you ran sort / summarize / ask on, passed to Claude and not retained.

Wipes

Settings → Privacy has two buttons:

• Clear indexed data — wipes the local index in your browser; keeps your settings + account.
• Clear everything — wipes the local index, settings, and logs you out.

Full details in our Privacy Policy.

Troubleshooting

When things look stuck.

"0 conversations indexed" but I have conversations on Claude

Open at least one Claude tab and wait 5-10 seconds. Memex pulls the list via the Claude tab; without one, the background can't reach the API. If it still shows 0 after a minute, reload the extension and try again.

Sort says "Daily limit reached"

Premium gives you a daily sort allowance that refreshes 24 hours after the first sort of your window — the clock starts when you ran it, not at UTC midnight. How many sorts per day depends on your tier (see the Premium table). The popup shows your remaining sorts and the exact time-to-reset under the Re-sort button.

Ask Memex says "No matching results"

Embeddings only cover conversations indexed under the current account. If you've recently switched accounts (or this is a fresh install), older conversations need a re-index pass. Click Re-index in Settings → Indexing — that also kicks off the embedding pass. When an ask finds nothing, Memex refunds the question, so a miss never eats into your allowance.

Notion export fails with "Memex has no page to write to"

Notion only lets integrations write to pages you've explicitly shared. The fastest fix: in Notion, open the destination page → ⋯ → Connections → Add connections → search "Memex" → add. The cleaner fix: in Memex Settings → Export, Disconnect then Connect to Notion again and pick a destination page on the "Select pages" screen. See Notion integration for the full story.

I bought Premium but it still shows Free

Settings → Account → ↻ next to Plan. That refreshes your status from Stripe. Usually resolves within seconds.

"Try again in X minutes" on sign-in or sign-up

Memex limits how many sign-in attempts can come from one network in a short window (anti-abuse). Wait for the countdown shown in the message, then try again.

Long-conversation toast never shows

Confirm Settings → Toasts → Long conversation is on. The toast also stays quiet if you've already dismissed it for that conversation, or if you haven't yet crossed the message count set in Settings → Toasts → Warn after this many of your messages.

Sync push errors with "unrecognised_claude_account"

The server doesn't recognise the Claude account that one of your local groups was created under. Reopen the Memex popup on a claude.ai tab — the background auto-registers the account on next wake. If it persists, sign out and back in.