Capturing important content into Obsidian is easy with a browser extension called Obsidian Web Clipper. While it is incredibly powerful, it is also complex. In this tutorial, we are going to see how to use Web Clipper for the most typical use cases easily and integrate AI to summarise content for later.
Learn the foundational systems researchers are rarely taught: from powerful note-taking and knowledge management methods to modern lit review tools, ethical AI and productive research workflows.
What is the Obsidian Web Clipper?
The Obsidian Web Clipper is a browser plugin that lets you extract information from websites, process it with AI, and pass it to Obsidian, creating a new note or appending the information to an existing one. This plugin is extremely flexible due to its use of templates, making it extremely powerful but also complex.
It can capture almost anything, except research papers, which are better handled by dedicated software like Zotero or PaperPile. However, Web Clipper is great for capturing a “reading intent” for a paper. i.e. if you want to remind yourself to read a specific paper before adding it to your Zotero library. This method helps you to avoid saving too many irrelevant papers into your library.
If you are new to Obsidian, please join me on a 21 day journey on how to use Obsidian for academics:
How to Use Obsidian Web Clipper?
Start by downloading and installing the extension from here. WebClipper is a browser extensions, so naturally it captures websites, using these steps:
- Navigate to the page you want to capture and click the Web Clipper icon.
- Web Clipper extracts various properties from the website and makes them available in variables. For instance, {{title}} will give you the title of the website, while {{author}} will contain the authors (if applicable) and {{content}} will be the actual text of the article you are reading. There are dozens of additional variables you can access.
- Next Web Clipper uses a template which contains these variables to create a piece of content that is infinitely customisable to your needs.
- Finally WebClipper either inserts the content from the previous step into a new note in Obsidian or appends it to an existing one of your choosing.
You can create multiple templates that combine the variables in different ways. For instance, you would use a different template to create a note on a video than on an academic paper. Here is how it looks:
Notice that you can choose which template you want to use, and you get a preview of the note that is going to be created once you click on “Add to Obsidian”. Let’s look at the next step, how to configure the template and what the output looks like.
Step 1: Creating Clipper Templates
To capture anything, you first need to define a template. Navigate to the settings of the plugin to see the list of templates. The template describes what Web Clipper will write into your Obsidian vault. Here is how it looks:
The template defines the content and properties of your note. You can find a list of available variables here. The process is not much different from configuring an Obsidian template.
Step 2: Capturing Websites to Obsidian
Capture any website by pressing the extension button (usually at the top right of your browser). This will open the Web Clipper interface and select the template you just created. Note that the window opened by the extensions contains a highlight button to highlight parts of the website. These highlights can be imported into your notes as well using the variable {{highlights}}. Here is how the capture phase and the captured note in Obsidian looks like:
Web Clipper will automatically open the Obsidian note after capture, and you can continue editing it. Next, we are going to integrate AI into the template, so that we can use AI to summarise the website, create tags, extract quotes and anything else you want.
Step 3: Integrating AI into Obsidian Web Clipper
An absolute must-have is the AI functionality in Web Clipper. For instance, when you capture a link to a website, you might want to create a quick summary using AI or have AI suggest a few tags on the content. This is done by defining prompt variables. Each template can contain prompt variables just like regular variables. A prompt variable looks like so {{“Summarise the article in 120 words”}}. The only difference to a pre-defined variable like {{title}} is that you add quotation marks to delineate an AI prompt.
Before using AI prompts, you need to tell Web Clipper which AI to use (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). You only need to do it once. Go to the settings of the extension in your browser and click on “Interpreter” in the left sidebar. Here is what you need to do:
The steps needed for configuration are (corresponding to the image above):
- Add the API key: The API key is a type of secret password that allows Web Clipper to access AI on your behalf. It tracks your usage and how much this will cost. The cost will primarily depend on the model you choose. Expensive models are capable of reasoning and can solve far more complex tasks but are slower and more expensive. Prices as of Jan 2026 range between 100 for 1 million words.
- Choose the model: For summarising websites, an older, cheaper model is usually sufficient. In the example above, I have chosen GPT-4o Mini, which costs only a few cents for a million words and will likely be enough for months of usage. This makes AI use with Web Clipper virtually free.
- Choose a context: This defines what AI will see when you send it prompts. The default is {{fullHTML}}, which sends the entire code for the website, including sidebars, headers and footers. To speed up AI use, change this to {{content}}. This will provide only the actual text of the article you are reading, without any code, making the call much faster.
That’s it you have configured the AI in Obsidian Web Clipper.
You can now add prompt variables, like in the example below, where AI creates a short summary of the article (like an abstract) and pulls a few quotes from it. Along with my highlights, this will help me remember what this article was about even years later:
The AI analysis took 5.79 seconds, as indicated by the green box above the “Add to Obsidian Button”. Some more extensive models can take as long as 40 seconds to run. Try out a few models to find your sweetspot between thoroughness and speed/price.
There are countless other use cases you can imagine using Obsidian templates in combination with AI prompt variables. While it takes some setup and tinkering until everything works smoothly the end result is incredibly powerful.
Capturing Ideas and Links to Obsidian
Another way to capture short notes, such as a link or a reminder, is to append them to an existing note rather than create a standalone note. I prefer to use a so-called “Inbox” note where I drop in links or interesting content I find online, to read them later. Here is how I configure the template:
The template only captures the date, title and link of the website, but not highlights or content. And here is the end result:
The Inbox note is a repository that ideally is kept as empty as possible. I used a bit of Markdown formatting here to display the article title as a Markdown link using “[{{title}}]({{url}})” in the template.
Capturing to an inbox is incredibly useful for capturing academic papers as well. It is much faster and more “lightweight” than storing it in Zotero. My workflow is to clip papers I want to read to an inbox note that is specific to a paper or project I am working on, and if I end up reading the paper, I use Zotero or Paperpile to import the exact metadata and annotations into Obsidian. In fact, using a reading list is one of the best weapons to avoid overwhelm:
Saving Academic Papers through Zotero or Paperpile
While you could navigate to a journals website and capture the article directly using Obsidian Webclipper the meta-data (i.e. DOI, authors etc) will generally not be reliably extracted (and your templates might break on a different journal website). In this case it is best to use the Zotero or Paperpile extensions, capture your papers into Zotero or Paperpile and then import them into Obsidian using the ZotLit or Citations plugin respectively.
Using ZotLit and Zotero also allows you to import your annotations made in Zotero. However, the best method, I found when working with academic papers in Obsidian is a plugin called PDF++, which allows to create deep-links to your annotations. Here is the tutorial on how to work wuth academic papers in Obsidian:
Working with PDFs in Obsidian: PDF++ Plugin and Full-Text Search
If you are new to Obsidian, the sheer number of plugins, can be quite overwhelming. This is why I developed a free step-by-step course to get your started. Click here to sign up:
Obsidian Webclipper Templates
Obsidian Web Clipper allows you to import and export templates. This makes it easy for others to share their templates that you can download and modify. Here are some sources:
- Templates made by Obsidian’s CEO
- A repository by the Obsidian community
- The official Discord channel for Web Clipper templates
Even if you don’t use other people’s templates, they are a great resource to learn what is possible. This is especially useful if you aren’t good at coding but want to use the extensive customisation capabilities these templates offer.
Summary: Obsidian Web Clipper
Obsidian’s Web Clipper is the official way how to capture any website, video, or post from the web to Obsidian. It can replace services like Readwise or Raindrop, by moving all your captures to a secure (and free) Obsidian repository. Web Clipper offers an incredibly powerful templating engine, which can extract information from a website, process it with AI, insert it into a pre-defined template and store the result in a new note (or append to an existing note) in Obsidian – all local and very fast.