The essay is due Friday. You read the perfect source two weeks ago — you remember it argued something about labor markets after automation — but it’s gone. It’s not in your browser history, it’s not in the doc where you pasted “links to use,” and the seventeen tabs you kept open as a filing system got closed by a restart. Students don’t have a saving problem; browsers save things fine. They have a finding problem, and it gets worse every semester.
Marqly is an AI bookmark manager built around that finding problem. You save readings and lecture videos with one click, Pro tags and summarizes them automatically, and when the deadline arrives you search by describing what you remember — not by guessing what a title was.
Highlight readings the way you’d mark up a textbook
Assigned readings live on the open web: journal pages, news analysis, course blogs, long PDFs of policy reports. Marqly’s highlighter lets you select text on any website and mark it in one of six colors, with notes attached. Use a color system — yellow for definitions, green for evidence, red for claims you want to argue against — and add a note like “counterexample for thesis, para 3” while the thought is fresh.
Two things make this more than a browser trick. First, highlights persist: reopen the reading before the seminar and your markings are still on the page. Second, every highlight syncs to your Marqly library, so at essay time you’re not rereading whole articles — you’re scanning the exact passages you flagged, with your own notes beside them.
Save lecture videos with the transcript attached
A huge share of studying now happens on YouTube: recorded lectures, exam-prep channels, that one 40-minute video that finally made eigenvectors click. Marqly puts an AI card on every YouTube watch page. On Pro, the Summary tab streams a TL;DR with key sections (and lists books mentioned in the video — useful when a lecturer name-drops further reading). The Transcript tab is synced to playback, so you can jump to the exact minute a concept is explained, and copy the whole transcript in one click for your notes.
The part that pays off later: the bookmark button Marqly adds to YouTube’s action row saves the video with its transcript attached. That means the content of the lecture becomes searchable, not just its title. If you’re revising and only remember “the video where he compared entropy to shuffling cards,” that’s enough. There’s a full walkthrough in how to summarize YouTube videos with AI.
On Pro, a Chat tab answers questions from the video’s transcript — handy for “did she cover the 1929 comparison in this lecture or the last one?” without scrubbing through an hour of footage.
Find every source when the deadline hits
This is where the two weeks of saving turn into a bibliography. Marqly Pro’s semantic search finds saves by meaning, not keywords — it searches across titles, page content, your highlights, and video transcripts. Type “study about sleep and memory consolidation in undergrads” and the article surfaces even if its actual title was something unhelpful like “New findings challenge assumptions.” If you’ve never used search that works this way, what is semantic search explains it in two minutes.
Pro AI summaries help at the other end of the process too: before an essay, skim the summaries of everything you saved for the unit and shortlist the five sources actually worth citing, instead of reopening twenty tabs.
One board per course
Boards let you group links and highlights, so “ECON 201,” “Dissertation,” and “Internship applications” stay separate instead of blending into one pile. A board can also be shared as a public page that anyone can view without signing up — one link sends your whole revision reading list to a study group, and they don’t need accounts to use it.
Getting started
- Install the extension. Marqly runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. There’s also an iOS app for saving from your phone.
- Import what you already have. Every browser exports bookmarks as an HTML file, and Marqly imports that format directly — along with Pocket exports and Raindrop.io collections if you used those.
- Let AI tag the backlog. On Pro, imports and new saves can be tagged automatically. The pile of bookmarks from three semesters becomes an organized, searchable library without an afternoon of manual filing.
Saving, transcripts and highlighting work on the free tier — is Marqly free? covers exactly what’s included, and where its limits are. The AI features, semantic search included, are Pro, and you unlock them by upgrading at app.marqly.com.
One honest caveat before you commit: offline reading is a Pro feature in the web and iOS apps, and it only caches the pages you mark, on one device at a time — it won’t replace a read-it-later app that keeps your whole queue synced for flights. If your studying is mostly offline, that row is a weaker fit; for everyone working in a desktop browser — or from the iOS or Android app — it’s built for exactly the semester you’re having.
The reading matrix — free template
The fastest grade-changer for essay season isn’t reading more — it’s a matrix: one row per source, with the source’s own claims kept apart from your analysis. Fill one per week and your lit review is half written before you start drafting.
- Reading matrix — CSV · how to use it
- Interactive version: research table builder — same columns, fillable in your browser, exports CSV/Markdown/a Marqly-importable file
Works alongside whatever your department recommends (Zotero for citations), and with Marqly for the capture-and-re-find loop: save each reading to a course board, then find it again by describing the idea.
Check the plan and import path first
| Need | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Save and find a small reference library | Up to 100 saves; keyword search | Unlimited saves |
| Organize an imported backlog automatically | Manual tags | Automatic tagging on import |
| Retrieve sources by meaning | Keyword search | Semantic search |
| Triage saved articles | Read the source | AI summaries |
Marqly accepts browser bookmark HTML, Pocket list.csv, and Raindrop HTML. Original save dates are not preserved. Keep a backup and inspect a small sample with the bookmark-file viewer before migrating your library. The import-fidelity study explains why an export file and a faithful import are different checks.
Official product documentation checked as of October 6, 2026: free-plan limits, semantic search, and browser HTML import. These are Marqly’s own product documents, not independent reviews. See the extension’s browser feature matrix before choosing a browser, and current pricing before upgrading.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Marqly free for students?
Marqly has a free tier that anyone can use — sign up at app.marqly.com with no card required. Verified students also get a discount: Pro is $48 for your first year (instead of $72), confirmed automatically with a university email at checkout. Most students can start on the free tier and upgrade only if they need Pro features like AI summaries, semantic search, and chat.
Can Marqly save YouTube lectures with the transcript?
Yes. Marqly adds an AI card to every YouTube watch page with a playback-synced transcript you can copy in one click, plus a Pro AI summary with key sections. A bookmark button in YouTube's action row saves the video to your library with its transcript attached, so Pro semantic search can later find the lecture by what was said in it.
Do my highlights stay on the page when I come back to a reading?
They do. When you highlight text on a website with Marqly, the highlight persists on the page when you revisit it, so a reading looks the way you left it. Highlights also sync to your Marqly library, where you can search them, add notes to them, and group them onto boards alongside the rest of your sources.
