The job sounds almost too simple to be unsolved: mark up a web page the way you’d mark up a printed page — and have the marks stay. Browsers don’t do it at all. Copy-pasting quotes into a notes app captures text but strips the context, and you never look at the notes file again anyway.
Marqly’s highlighter, part of its browser extension, does the simple thing properly: select text on any website, highlight it in one of six colors, attach a note. The highlights persist on the page when you revisit, and every one of them syncs to a central library where they’re searchable. Marks that stay put, plus a collection that builds itself.
Six colors and notes, on any site
Highlighting works wherever you read: news sites, documentation, blog posts, long-form essays. Select the text and mark it — no special reader view required, no copying the article into another app first.
The six colors let you keep a real system, the same way you would with physical highlighters: yellow for key claims, green for evidence, red for the parts you disagree with — whatever scheme you already think in. And notes attach directly to a highlight, which is where the durable value lives. A bare highlight tells future-you that something mattered; the note says why. Step-by-step setup is in how to highlight text on any website.
Come back next month — the highlights are still there
This is the feature that separates a real web highlighter from a screenshot habit: persistence. Reopen a page you marked up weeks ago and your highlights render right where you left them, notes included. The page behaves like your annotated copy of it.
That changes how rereading works. Revisiting a dense reference page means your past attention is already mapped onto it — the four passages that mattered are lit up, and you skip the other ninety percent. The details of how this works are in do highlights stay on the page?
One library collects every highlight
Persistence solves the on-page half; sync solves the other half. Every highlight you make is collected in your Marqly library, alongside your saved links. That gives you a second way to use your highlights: away from the pages, as a body of passages you chose to keep.
Reviewing for a piece of writing, a decision, a purchase? Instead of reopening a dozen tabs, open the library and read just the highlighted material across all of them. And because Marqly’s semantic search covers highlights — by meaning, not keywords — “that stat about remote work productivity” finds the highlighted sentence even months later, without remembering which article it came from. Search spans your whole library at once — titles, page content, highlights, and video transcripts — so a highlight and the article it came from surface together. The side-panel library brings the same search right next to the page you’re reading, no tab switch required.
Highlights are auto-tagged along with your saves, so the collection organizes itself. No filing, for the same reason Marqly doesn’t make you file bookmarks — manual filing is the step people quit.
Highlights become building blocks in boards
Marqly’s boards group links and highlights into deliberate collections — which turns highlights from passive marks into working material. Building a case for a decision, assembling research for a project, collecting the best passages on a topic: drop the relevant highlights and links into a board and the argument assembles itself in one view.
Boards can be shared as public pages that anyone can open without signing up. That means “here’s the evidence, key passages marked” can be a single link — the highlights you made while reading become something you can hand to another person.
Getting started
- Install the Marqly extension — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari.
- Sign up free at app.marqly.com; no card required.
- Open any article, select a sentence worth keeping, and highlight it. Add a one-line note.
- Tomorrow, reopen the page (it’s there) and check your library (it’s there too). That’s the whole loop.
The free tier gets you highlighting immediately. Pro — $48/year (about $4/month billed annually) or $8/month, with a 7-day trial — adds chat with your saves, where answers draw on your saved content, highlights included.
Is Marqly the right fit?
Boundaries, honestly drawn: the highlighter lives in the browser extension, so it works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari — highlighting isn’t something you do from the iOS app, and there’s no Android app (the web app runs in Android browsers for reviewing your library). There’s no offline mode either.
If what you want is a pen for the web — marks that survive, notes attached, everything collected somewhere searchable — this is exactly the job Marqly’s highlighter does. Try it free at app.marqly.com.
Frequently asked questions
Do highlights stay on the page when I come back?
Yes — that's the defining feature. Highlight a passage today, reopen the page next month, and the highlight is still there in place, with any note you attached. You don't re-mark anything or dig through a separate app to reconstruct what you marked. The same highlights also sync to your Marqly library, so they're reviewable away from the page too.
Can I add notes to my highlights?
Yes. Every highlight can carry a note — the 'why this mattered' that a bare highlight loses within a week. Select text, pick one of the six colors, and write the note in place. Notes travel with the highlight: they show on the page when you revisit and appear alongside the highlight in your library, where they're searchable.
Which browsers does the highlighter work in?
The Marqly extension is available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari — the highlighter comes with it on all four. Your highlights sync to your library in the web app, and there's an iOS app as well. There's no Android app; on Android, the web app works in the browser for reviewing your library and highlights.