Academic reading has three separate jobs stacked on top of each other: keeping up with the literature in your field, collecting materials for teaching, and covering the background reading a grant application demands. Each one generates its own pile of open tabs, and none of the piles talk to each other. The paper you skimmed in March becomes urgent in September, and all you remember is that it had a striking figure about replication rates.
Marqly is an AI bookmark manager built for exactly that retrieval problem. Save anything you read in one click, mark it up as you go, and find it later by describing what you remember — semantic search works by meaning, not keywords, across titles, content, highlights, and even video transcripts.
Highlight like you would on paper
Close reading on the web usually means copying quotes into a separate document and losing the context. Marqly’s highlighter works the way a pen does: select text on any website, highlight it in one of six colors, and attach a note. Use color as a scheme if you like — one for methods, one for findings, one for claims you doubt.
Two properties make it work for scholarship rather than just decoration:
- Highlights persist on the page. Revisit the article next semester and your markup is still there — here’s exactly how that works.
- Highlights sync to your library. Every highlight is collected centrally and searchable, so “review everything I marked about measurement invariance” is a query, not an afternoon of reopening tabs.
The walkthrough is in how to highlight text on any website.
Triage the backlog with AI summaries
Nobody reads everything in their field; the honest job is deciding what deserves deep reading. Marqly generates AI summaries of saved articles, which turns a fifty-item backlog into a triage list. Skim the summary, then commit to the full read or move on — the difference between a reading list that gets worked through and one that just grows.
Every save is also auto-tagged by AI, which quietly removes the filing step. You don’t decide whether a paper goes in “teaching,” “grant,” or “core lit” — it’s simply findable under all the things it’s about. If you’ve ever built an elaborate folder taxonomy and watched it rot, the reasoning in why folder-based organizing is obsolete will feel familiar.
Boards for courses, projects, and grants
Tags are automatic; boards are deliberate. Group links and highlights into a board per course, per paper-in-progress, or per grant application — the readings, the key highlighted passages, the talk that framed the problem.
Boards can be shared as public pages, viewable without signup. That makes them a low-friction way to hand a reading list to students, or to give a co-author a view of the literature you’ve assembled — no new tool for them to adopt, just a link. (Sharing is view-only; Marqly has no collaborative editing.)
For sources that might move or vanish — a preprint page, a dataset description, a course resource — Save as PDF captures the page as a clean PDF matching the on-screen layout, processed locally in your browser, so the copy in your library outlives the URL.
Recorded talks are reading too
A growing share of the literature isn’t text: conference keynotes, recorded seminars, methods walkthroughs on YouTube. Marqly’s extension puts an AI card on every YouTube watch page — a streaming TL;DR with key sections, a playback-synced transcript tab with one-click copy, and a bookmark button that saves the video with its transcript attached.
That last part matters for scholars: once the transcript is in your library, semantic search covers what was said in the talk, not just its title. The hour-long keynote becomes as searchable as a PDF. More in summarize YouTube videos with AI.
Getting started
- Install the Marqly extension — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari.
- Sign up free at app.marqly.com; no card required.
- Import your existing browser bookmarks (standard HTML export) so years of saved links get AI tags retroactively.
- Pick one current project — a syllabus, a lit review — and give it a board.
The free tier covers the core workflow. Pro is $48/year (about $4/month billed annually) or $8/month with a 7-day trial, and adds chat with your saves — asking questions answered from your own saved reading, which is genuinely useful across a large literature pile.
Is Marqly the right fit?
The honest boundaries: Marqly is not a reference manager — it won’t format citations or export a bibliography, so it complements Zotero-style tools rather than replacing them. There’s no offline reading mode, no Android app (the web app runs in Android browsers), and board sharing is view-only rather than collaborative.
What it does is the layer most academic stacks are missing: one searchable place for everything you read, highlight, and half-remember on the web. Try it free at app.marqly.com.
Frequently asked questions
Do my highlights stay on the page when I reopen a paper?
Yes. Highlights persist on the page when you revisit it — reopen an article you marked up last month and your highlights and notes are still there, in place. They also sync to your Marqly library, so you can review everything you've highlighted across sources without reopening each page. That's the difference between highlighting and copying quotes into a separate document.
Can I share a reading list with my students?
Yes, through boards. Group the readings for a course or seminar into a board, then share it as a public page. Students open it in any browser with no signup and no account — practical when you don't want to force another tool on a class. Sharing is view-only: you control what's on the list, and updates you make appear on the shared page.
Does Marqly replace a reference manager?
No, and it doesn't try to. Marqly doesn't format citations or manage bibliographies — keep your reference manager for that. Marqly covers the stage before citation: capturing what you read across the web, highlighting and annotating it, triaging the backlog with AI summaries, and finding a half-remembered source months later by describing it.