Highlight your own words on every page automatically, and keep the passages you select. Twice the free word limit. Works offline.
Users
7
−1 in 30 days
Rating
0.0 / 5
unchanged in 30 days
Ratings
0
0 in 30 days
Store rank
#227K
#189K among extensions
Version
1.0.2
updated 24 Sep 2026
Users
monthly, 2 months
Latest, 15 Oct 2026:7 usersMove the mouse over the chart for any month
Ratings count
monthly, 2 months
Latest, 15 Oct 2026:0 ratingsMove the mouse over the chart for any month
The Chrome Web Store rounds user counts down to the leading digit, so the user line moves in steps. The ratings count is exact and is the better signal of real adoption.
About SmartHighlight — highlight words & text
SmartHighlight does two things, and does both without getting in your way.
AUTOMATIC HIGHLIGHTING
Keep lists of words you care about — competitors, clients, technical terms,
names you are tracking — and they light up on every page you visit, in the
colour you chose for that list.
• 400 words across your lists, twice what the closest alternative allows, and
no cap on how many of them go in any one list.
• No minimum word length. "EU", "AI" and "R&D" work like everything else.
• Five thousand words does not slow the page down. Matching is done with an
algorithm whose cost depends on the length of the page, not on how many words
you are looking for.
• No flicker, ever. Highlighting is painted by the browser's own highlight API
and never rewrites the page, so it cannot fight with the site's own code and
cannot break a page that updates as you read it.
• Works on pages that load content as you scroll, and on apps that change the
page without reloading it.
MANUAL HIGHLIGHTING
Select any passage and keep it, with a note and tags if you want. Your
highlights come back the next time you open the page — even after the page has
been edited, because they are found by their text rather than by their position.
If a highlighted passage is deleted from a page, the highlight is never silently
thrown away: it stays in your library, marked, with a link to where it came
from.
The search box searches your notes and your tags, not only the quoted passage.
Tags can be renamed everywhere at once, and renaming one onto another merges
them.
PDFs
Chrome's built-in PDF viewer is a separate, privileged extension: nothing anyone
installs can reach inside it. SmartHighlight opens the document in its own
viewer instead, where automatic highlighting, manual highlighting, notes, the
library and the export all work exactly as they do on a page. Your highlights
are keyed to the PDF's own address, so reopening the document finds them again.
The first time you open a PDF, the extension explains this and asks. Say yes and
PDFs open here from then on; say later and it never asks again. Either answer is
undone in one click in the options.
EVERYTHING IS EXPORTABLE
Markdown, CSV, plain text, or a complete JSON file that can be imported back
exactly. Every exported quote carries the URL of the page it came from — an
export without sources is not much use for the things you export for.
A snapshot of everything is taken once a day and the last seven are kept, on
your machine, so deleting something by mistake is recoverable.
YOUR DATA
In demo mode nothing leaves your browser at all.
With a free account, your lists and highlights sync between all your devices —
however many you use. You can download everything at any time, and deleting your
account really deletes it: immediately and completely.
No advertising. No selling data. No tracking of the pages you visit: the
extension reads page text to find your words, and that text never leaves the
page.
WHAT YOU GET, IN PLAIN NUMBERS
Demo, no account: 20 words, 2 lists, 20 highlights. Everything stays on this
machine, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Free account: 400 words, 25 lists, 1000 highlights, sync across all your
devices, daily local backups, and every export format.
That is the whole product. There is nothing to buy, no trial that expires and no
feature held back behind a payment.
If you reach a limit, nothing you have already made stops working. Only new
additions are affected, you are told as you approach it rather than when you hit
it, and deleting something you no longer need makes room again immediately.
KEYBOARD
Four shortcuts are built in and all of them can be changed at
chrome://extensions/shortcuts.