How to Use ChatGPT to Organize Your Bookmarks

If you’re like me, your browser’s bookmark bar probably looks like a digital junkyard—countless saved links with no real organization. But there’s hope! Here’s my step-by-step guide on how to use ChatGPT to declutter and organize your browser bookmarks.

Step 1: Export Your Bookmark File

First things first—we need to get your bookmarks out of your browser. The exact steps will vary depending on which browser you use, but it’s generally pretty straightforward.

For Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers like Edge or Brave, click the three-dot menu (top-right corner) > Bookmarks and Lists > Bookmark Manager. From there, click the three-dot menu (top-right corner) again and select “Export bookmarks.” This will save your bookmarks as an HTML file.

Firefox users can click the hamburger button (three horizontal lines in top-right corner), select “Bookmarks” and then “Manage Bookmarks.” From the new window that opens, click Import and Backup > Export Bookmarks to HTML.

For Safari folks, click File > Export Bookmarks. Simple as that!

Step 2: Share the Bookmark File Content With ChatGPT

Open the bookmark file, and it should open a new page in your browser. You’ll see all your bookmarked links listed. However, we don’t want this view—we need the actual code containing the URLs and the folder structure. To get this, right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.” This shows you the actual HTML code we need.

Click anywhere in this code view, press Ctrl+A (or Command+A on Mac) to select everything, and copy it. Now head over to ChatGPT and paste the entire code into a new message.

First, we want a clean list of all the URLs in the bookmark file and strip away all the HTML formatting. To do this, simply copy paste the bookmark file source code (as shown in the previous step) along with this prompt:

I copy-pasted the HTML code for a bookmark file. Please count and tell me the total number of URLs in the file and then list the URLs in a format you can easily copy and paste.

This works like a charm if you’re dealing with fewer than 50 bookmarks. But what if you’re a bookmark hoarder like me? In that case, we need to level up our approach. If you’ve got ChatGPT Plus, switch to o1 model and use the Canvas feature with this prompt:

Create a tool where I can upload a bookmark file. It will tell me the total number of bookmarks in the file and then give me a complete list of all the bookmark URLs, so I can copy and paste them easily.

This will generate the code for the tool in ChatGPT Canvas. When you hit the Preview button in the top-right corner, it will render the application for you to use in real-time. That said, the application might not be error-free on the first go! You might need to do a few back-and-forths to get it to work perfectly. Just ask ChatGPT to fix any bugs as you encounter them or add any new feature, and it will do it.

Ask ChatGPT to Create a Better Bookmark Folder Structure

With our URLs extracted, it’s time for the fun part—creating an organized folder structure. To do this, open a new chat in ChatGPT, paste the list of URLs, and enter this prompt:

Analyze this list of URLs and create a smart bookmark folder structure. Your approach should:

1. First analyze each URL by:
   • Extracting and understanding the domain name
   • Parsing the URL path structure
   • Identifying key topics from URL keywords
   • Recognizing common patterns across URLs
   • Detecting related technologies, tools, or platforms
2. Then perform intelligent grouping by:
   • Finding natural clusters of related content
   • Identifying parent-child relationships between topics
   • Recognizing when URLs serve similar purposes
   • Detecting URLs that belong to the same service/platform
   • Understanding context from URL patterns
   • You can create folders and subfolder clusters for better organization
3. Create meaningful folder names that:
   • Accurately describe the content
   • Use clear, specific terminology
   • Use one word names
   • Reflect the actual relationship between items
   • Make logical sense to a human user
4. Generate the folder structure in standard HTML bookmark format.
5. Generate browser-compatible HTML bookmark structure WITHOUT the actual URLs (I’ll add them back later)

Before generating the structure, explain your grouping logic so I can verify it makes sense.

Here are the URLs to analyze: [URLs here]

What you’ll get is HTML code for folders and subfolders, but without any links—yet.

This is where you can really customize things. You can iterate on the results by chatting about your preferences—maybe you want a “Work” folder with subfolders for different projects, or a “Shopping” folder organized by category. Keep tweaking until it matches your requirements.

Step 3: Create a New Bookmark File

Once you’re happy with the structure, copy the code into a text file and save it with an HTML extension. This gives you a clean bookmark file with your perfect folder structure, ready to be populated with your actual bookmarks. Make sure to set Save As Type to “All Files” and not TXT.

Now we just need to populate it with your actual bookmarks. Of course, you can do this manually, but where’s the fun in that? Let’s see how ChatGPT can work here.

Step 4: Ask ChatGPT to Populate Your Bookmark File With Links

Share the HTML code for bookmark folder structure along with the complete list of URLs into ChatGPT with this prompt:

Here’s the bookmark folder structure in HTML code:

And here’s a list of URLs for different websites:

I want you to organize the list of URLs into the correct folders or subfolders. If you have any confusion regarding where a particular URL will go, then please ask me.

Also, please generate this in the HTML code format for bookmarks.

Again, I’ve found that o1 and o3-mini works best for this task. You can use GPT-4o, but the organization is not as good.

Keep in mind that ChatGPT works best with smaller batches. If you have more than 100 URLs to organize, break them into smaller groups and process them separately. This helps ensure accuracy and prevents the AI from getting overwhelmed or making mistakes.

Step 5: Import the Bookmark File Into Your Browser of Choice

In the previous step, if you have fewer bookmarks and ChatGPT was able to process the entire thing and generate a complete bookmark file for you, then great! However, if you have to break up the process, then just piece together all the URLs into the right folders by copying them from ChatGPT and pasting them into the new bookmark file.

For reference, the part starting with