The web should remember what mattered
I read a lot.
Articles, essays, landing pages, product pages, startup breakdowns, newsletters, random posts I find while researching something else.
One day I was talking with friends and wanted to bring up a specific line I had read somewhere. I knew the idea. I remembered why it mattered. But I could not remember where it was.
That annoyed me because in a book this problem is basically solved.
You highlight the line. You come back later. The mark is still there.
But the web did not feel like that.
On the web, the moment disappears. You save the page, maybe. You screenshot it, maybe. You paste the link somewhere, maybe. But when you return, the thing you actually cared about is hidden again inside the page.
So I built the first version of Gleanit as a highlighter for the web.
The idea was simple: when I highlight something on a page, that highlight should live on the page. If I come back tomorrow, next week, or three months later, I should see what I liked right there, in context.
Not buried in a notes app.
Not lost in a screenshot folder.
Still on the page.
Then I realized it was not just text
At first, Gleanit was about text highlights.
But pretty quickly I realized the things worth saving are not always sentences.
Sometimes it is a pricing table.
Sometimes it is a landing page section.
Sometimes it is a layout, an ad, a chart, a screenshot, a visual pattern, or the way someone structured an offer.
So Gleanit grew from text highlights into a broader capture tool.
Now you can save highlights, notes, screenshots, page elements, images, and full pages. Video capture is on the roadmap too.
The goal is the same: capture the thing that mattered, tied to the source, so you can come back and understand why you saved it.
Some parts are still a work in progress. Reanchoring highlights perfectly across every kind of page, especially PDFs and more complex documents, still needs work. But the direction is clear, and the foundation is there.
The web should become something you can mark up, revisit, search, and actually use.
Saving was only half the problem
Once I had capture working, the next problem became obvious.
Saving more things creates a new kind of mess.
If you highlight 10 things, you can remember them.
If you highlight 1,000 things, you need search.
So I built search into the center of Gleanit.
Not just "find the page title." Not just "search the URL." I wanted to search the actual things I had captured: the highlight, the note, the screenshot context, the tags, the collections, the source.
Because that is the real workflow.
You are not usually thinking, "What was the exact URL?"
You are thinking, "Where was that line about curiosity gaps?"
Or, "What was that pricing page I liked?"
Or, "Where did I save that example of a great landing page section?"
That is why Gleanit is built around capture, find, and use.
Capture what matters. Find it later. Use when needed.
The marketing and copywriting use case clicked later
The more I used Gleanit, the more I realized it was not only useful for reading.
While working on a startup, I kept looking at competitors, landing pages, ads, email flows, pricing pages, testimonials, positioning, and product copy.
And I kept saving things because they were useful.
A good headline.
A strong CTA.
A clever pricing explanation.
A landing page section that handled objections well.
A sentence that made a product feel obvious.
That is when Gleanit started to feel less like a personal reading tool and more like a research workspace.
If you are writing marketing copy, building a startup, doing GTM research, writing essays, studying competitors, or collecting examples, you do not just need to save links.
You need to capture the exact thing that made you stop.
Then you need to find it when you are writing.
That is the gap Gleanit is built for.
What Gleanit is
Gleanit is a personal content library for the things you find on the web.
It is built around three steps:
Capture — highlight text, add notes, save screenshots, capture page elements, images, and full pages.
Find — search your saved research by content, source, collection, tag, or note.
Use — bring the right reference back when you are writing, researching, planning, or building.
It is not just a bookmark manager.
A bookmark saves where something was.
Gleanit saves what mattered.
Who we are building for
We are building Gleanit for people whose work depends on what they notice.
Writers. Founders. Marketers. Copywriters. Researchers. Students. People building swipe files. People comparing competitors. People who read a lot and hate losing the useful parts.
Right now, Gleanit is still early. Some workflows are polished. Some are still being built. Some, like better reanchoring across PDFs and complex pages, need more work.
But the core idea is already there:
The web should remember what you cared about.
And when you need it again, it should come back fast.
A couple of things we believe
Your captures should stay connected to the source.
A highlight is more useful when you can return to the original page and see it in context.
Search matters more than storage.
Saving is easy. Finding the right thing later is the product.
Less filing, more finding.
You should not need a perfect system to benefit from what you saved.
The best ideas usually show up before you are ready to use them.
Gleanit exists so you can catch them when they appear and bring them back when the moment is right.
The tool should go where the work happens.
One thing I dislike about a lot of productivity tools is that they always ask you to come back to them. Open Notion. Open Obsidian. Open another workspace. Maintain another system.
Gleanit is being designed around the opposite idea.
Your research should show up where you need it: on the page you saved it from, in the browser while you research, in search when you are trying to find something, and eventually inside the tools where you write, plan, and build.
You should not have to "go to Gleanit" every time to get value from Gleanit.
It should meet you where you already are.
Come build your library
We are early, and we are building in the open.
If you have ever read something, loved it, and then completely lost it when you needed it later, Gleanit was built for you.
Capture what matters. Find it later. Use when needed.
— Ovannes
Forge Software Inc.
Corrections: ovannes@hearye.co or our editorial policy.