I tested, verified, and ranked seven AI Chrome extensions that actually do something useful in 2026. Some write for you. Some read for you. One quietly fixes the emails behind your back. I’ve pulled the current Chrome Web Store ratings, the real developer names, and the pricing each company is charging this month. No vapor, no screenshots-from-2022.
The common thread: these extensions live where the work already happens. You don’t open a new tab, paste a prompt, and pray. You keep typing. The AI shows up.
“Grammarly is in the only browser extension that stays out of the way until it isn’t, then it quietly fixes the sentence you were about to send.” - paraphrase of how one ZDNet reviewer described the experience.
Quick Comparison: 7 AI Chrome Extensions at a Glance
| Extension | Chrome Web Store Rating | Users (CWS) | Free Tier | Paid Plan (annual billing) | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grammarly (Superhuman Platform Inc.) | 4.5 / 43.1K reviews | 35,000,000 | Yes - 100 AI prompts/mo | Plus from ~₹392 INR/mo (India) or Pro ~$12/mo (US) | Writing, tone, AI detection in every text box |
| MaxAI.me | 4.7 / featured | 1,000,000+ | Daily-limited multi-model chat | Pro $20/mo or Elite $19/mo annual (53% off $40) | Summarize, rewrite, and chat with any page |
| Merlin AI (Foyer Tech) | 4.8 / 8.8K reviews | 900,000 | 102 free queries/day | $19/mo billed annually | 26+ LLMs in one sidebar shortcut |
| Liner | Featured | 13M+ users | 100 agent credits/mo | Pro $14.99/mo or Max $29.99/mo annual | AI search with cited answers for research |
| SciSpace Copilot (PubGenius Inc.) | 4.4 / 144 reviews | 200,000 | Yes | Premium subscription (Save 41% annual) | Reading and explaining scientific papers |
| QuillBot (Course Hero / Learneo) | 4.7 / 5.6K reviews | 5,000,000 | 125-word paraphrase, 2 modes | Premium from ~₹334 INR/mo annual | Paraphrasing, plagiarism, AI Humanizer |
| ProWritingAid (Orpheus Technology) | 4.8 / 7K reviews | 200,000 | 500-word limit, 10 rephrases/day | Premium ~₹550/mo annual (₹6,600/yr) | Long-form fiction and business writing |
Sources: Chrome Web Store listings for each extension (verified July 2026), vendor pricing pages.
What “transform your workflow” actually means in 2026
I want to set one expectation before the list. A workflow isn’t transformed by a clever prompt or a flashy demo. It shifts when the tools stop asking you to switch context.
The 2026 cohort of AI Chrome extensions does three jobs well:
- It shows up where you already type. Gmail, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Notion, your CMS, your CMS’s login screen - wherever there’s a text box, the extension is there.
- It uses more than one model. The serious ones - MaxAI, Merlin, Grammarly’s Go - give you a roster of LLMs and let you switch on the fly.
- It remembers what it just did. Save prompts, save rewrites, save the link between your last email and your next draft.
If a tool only does one of those three things, it’s a feature. If it does all three, it’s workflow.
1. Grammarly - the writing copilot that now follows you everywhere
Who builds it: Superhuman Platform Inc. (the parent company that used to be called Grammarly Inc.). Headquarters in San Francisco. CEO Shishir Mehrotra, formerly of Coda, which Grammarly acquired in December 2024. The Chrome Web Store developer listing is “Grammarly,” with the company address at 548 Market St, San Francisco.
What you actually get. The extension sits in every text field across roughly 500,000 sites, per Grammarly’s own listing on the Chrome Web Store. You write, the underline appears, you accept or ignore. That part hasn’t changed in a decade. What changed in 2025 and 2026 is that Grammarly now ships an agent layer on top of the writing checker. It’s called Superhuman Go, and you turn it on inside the extension settings.
The headline numbers. The Chrome Web Store shows Grammarly at 4.5 stars across 43,100 ratings, with 35,000,000 users, and the current build (version 14.1311.0) was updated on July 13, 2026 - about a day before I wrote this. Grammarly’s homepage claims the product serves 40 million people every day and 50,000 organizations. Tom’s Guide and ZDNet both named it the default grammar-and-tone checker in their 2024 and 2025 roundups of AI Chrome extensions.
Pricing, right now. Grammarly restructured its plans in 2025 and split out Superhuman Go into a separate bundle that also includes Coda and Superhuman Mail. The standalone writing tier is now split by region. On the India pricing page, Plus is ₹392 INR per month when billed annually (₹1,000 monthly), with a Free tier at ₹0 that includes 100 AI prompts per month. On the US pricing page, Pro runs about $12/month annually (with a Free tier that includes grammar, spelling, and tone checks).
Real use case. You’re halfway through a long email in Gmail. Superhuman Go notices you mentioned a customer support issue from last week in a separate thread. It surfaces that context as a banner above your draft so you can acknowledge it without leaving the tab. You didn’t prompt it. That’s the pitch.
One honest caveat. In March 2026, a class-action lawsuit over an “Expert Review” feature prompted the company to retire the feature, per reporting in Wired and The Verge. That feature is not what this extension is. The grammar, tone, and Go agents are still shipping. If a teammate tells you about the author impersonation thing, just know it’s gone.
Sources: Chrome Web Store - Grammarly listing, Grammarly Plans page, Becoming Superhuman (Shishir Mehrotra, Grammarly blog, October 29, 2025), Wired (Miles Klee, March 4, 2026), Wikipedia: Grammarly (with sources cited).
2. MaxAI.me - one sidebar, every top model
Who builds it: MaxAI.me, a brand operated by MaxAI Inc. Their stated user count is 1,000,000+ active users, with 14,000+ five-star ratings and an average of 4.8 / 5 across their own site (cross-checked against the Chrome Web Store’s 4.7 / featured rating for the official listing). The Chrome Web Store extension id is mhnlakgilnojmhinhkckjpncpbhabphi.
What you actually get. Click the MaxAI icon in any tab and a sidebar opens. From there you can:
- Highlight any text on any page and ask for a summary, an explanation, or a rewrite.
- Paste a YouTube URL and ask a question about the video. It pulls the transcript and answers.
- Upload a PDF and chat with it.
- Translate any page in one click.
The model roster is the point. MaxAI bundles o1, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Haiku, Gemini-1.5-Pro and Flash, Llama-3.1-405B, and Mistral-Large-2. On the image side: DALL·E 3, FLUX.1-schnell/dev/pro, and Stable Diffusion 3 Medium. You pick. The free tier rotates in cheaper models (GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3.5-Haiku, Gemini-1.5-Flash, Llama-3.2-90B) on a daily cap.
Pricing. Free gets you daily-limited fast AI responses. Pro is $20 per month, monthly billing. Elite is $19 per month billed annually - the page currently shows it as a 53% discount off the $40 monthly equivalent.
Real use case. You’re reading a long regulatory filing on a vendor’s site. You don’t need to summarize the whole thing. You highlight one paragraph and ask MaxAI to “explain like I’m a CFO.” Three seconds later you have an answer pulled from that exact paragraph, with citations back to the source. No new tab, no copy-paste.
What I like. The “see the source, not just the answer” framing on their marketing site matches what the extension actually does. The number of supported models is real, not vapor.
Sources: maxai.me homepage, maxai.me pricing page, Chrome Web Store - MaxAI listing, a16z Top 100 GenAI consumer apps (2024 listing that named MaxAI).
3. Merlin AI - 26 models in a Ctrl+M sidebar
Who builds it: Foyer Tech Inc. The Chrome Web Store developer is “Foyer Tech,” based at 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware. The extension’s version 8.0.13 was published on July 6, 2026 - eight days before I wrote this. Rating on the Chrome Web Store: 4.8 out of 5 across 8,800 reviews, with 900,000 users.
What you actually get. Press Ctrl+M (or Cmd+M on macOS) anywhere in Chrome. A sidebar opens. You can ask any question, paste any webpage, drop in a YouTube link, upload a PDF, or trigger a saved prompt. Merlin then routes your prompt to the model you selected and brings the answer back into the sidebar.
The model roster. Merlin currently exposes GPT o1, o3, o4-mini, GPT 4.1, Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking, DeepSeek R1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash, Mistral Large, Llama 3.1 405B, and Grok 3. The free tier gives you 102 queries per day, weighted by model - asking GPT-4 costs ~30 queries, GPT-3.5 costs ~1.
Pricing. The home page advertises Merlin Pro at $19 per month, billed annually. Free exists. There’s also a Teams tier for groups of five or more.
Real use case. You’re a consultant. You’re in a Zoom chat transcript on a client’s Notion page. You hit Ctrl+M, ask Merlin to “extract the three open decisions and write a status email to the partner.” It does. You edit a sentence, hit send, and stay in the same tab.
What I trust. Foyer Tech publishes ISO 27001, AICPA SOC 2, and GDPR certifications on the pricing page. The 20M+ users claim on the marketing site is much higher than the 900,000 the Chrome Web Store lists - those are different counts (cross-platform total vs Chrome-only install base), but I want to flag it because it tripped me up the first read. The number I trust on the Chrome side is 900,000.
Sources: getmerlin.in homepage, getmerlin.in pricing, Chrome Web Store - Merlin AI listing (camppjleccjaphfdbohjdohecfnoikec).
4. Liner - AI search that gives you real citations
Who builds it: Liner, a Seoul- and US-based research-AI company that split its product into three pieces in 2026: Liner (search), Liner Scholar (research workspace), and Liner Write (drafting). The current pricing page is dated 2026.
What you actually get. Liner started as a web highlighter. In 2026 it’s a research assistant that runs across those three surfaces:
- Liner (search) is a Chrome sidebar that gives you cited answers on top of Google, with what Liner calls “line-by-line citation.” The company claims its Advanced Search outperformed peers on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark with a score of 95.3% - a public factual-accuracy test - pulling from a corpus of more than 480 million papers.
- Liner Scholar adds research-specific agents: hypothesis generator, citation recommender, literature review, research tracer, peer review simulator. These are credit-metered.
- Liner Write lets you search, draft, and edit inside one window.
Pricing. Free gets you 100 agent credits a month, 1 file upload/day capped at 25 MB, ads in search results. Pro is $14.99/month when billed annually ($17.99 monthly) and includes 1,000 credits, 20 file uploads/day up to 100 MB, ad-free search, and access to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude inside the workspace. Max is $29.99/month when billed annually ($35.99 monthly) with 2,500 credits and 200 MB file uploads. Team runs $26.99/seat, Enterprise is custom.
Real use case. You’re a graduate student writing a thesis. You have 30 PDFs open. You upload them all to Liner, ask it to “find the three papers that disagree on methodology,” and the agent returns a comparative table with citations to each PDF. You export that table to your draft.
Sources: liner.com pricing, liner.com/scholar, liner.com/learn.
5. SciSpace Copilot - the research-paper whisperer
Who builds it: PubGenius Inc., the company formerly known as Typeset. Headquarters at 691 S Milpitas Blvd, Milpitas, California. SciSpace says it serves 1 million+ researchers and lists Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Cambridge, and Yale among institutions that have used it. The Chrome Web Store listing is “SciSpace: Do hours of research in minutes,” developer email engineering-ops@typeset.io, version 1.5.4, updated April 28, 2026, with 200,000 users and a 4.4 rating across 144 reviews.
What you actually get. SciSpace’s Chrome extension (formerly called Copilot) does one specific job: explain anything you highlight on any research page. You’re on Nature, Springer, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, arXiv, even paywalled journals - highlight a sentence, a math equation, or a table, and the extension returns a plain-English explanation, a follow-up suggestion, or a citation to a related paper.
The free in-product literature review tool searches across 270 million+ papers in SciSpace’s repository. Answers come with citations and source locations, not vibes. SciSpace also exposes standalone web tools - paraphraser, AI detector, citation generator - but the Chrome extension is the on-page reading layer.
Pricing. SciSpace publishes monthly, annual, and team plans on typeset.io/pricing. The annual toggle shows a 41% discount versus monthly. Free tier exists with limited credits. Premium includes the full chat-with-PDF, literature review, and AI writer suite. The page also advertises a 100% money-back guarantee inside the first 24 hours if you cancel.
Real use case. You’re reading a 2024 biostats paper. You don’t know what a Cox proportional-hazards assumption is in plain English. You highlight the term. SciSpace returns a three-sentence explanation, then suggests two follow-up questions. You ask one. It answers. You’re still on the same Nature page.
Sources: typeset.io, typeset.io/copilot-chrome-plugin, typeset.io/pricing, Chrome Web Store - SciSpace listing (cipccbpjpemcnijhjcdjmkjhmhniiick).
6. QuillBot - the paraphraser that grew into a writing suite
Who builds it: QuillBot (Course Hero), LLC. QuillBot was founded in 2017 as a student paraphrasing tool. Course Hero - owned by Learneo - acquired QuillBot on August 21, 2021. The Chrome Web Store developer is “QuillBot (Course Hero), LLC,” based at 303 East Wacker Drive in Chicago.
What you actually get. The Chrome extension is a one-click rewriting layer that lives in any text box. Highlight a sentence, get the paraphrase. QuillBot’s flagship web product has nine paraphrase modes (Standard, Fluency, Formal, Simple, Creative, Academic, Expand, Shorten, and Custom), grammar and tone insights, AI Humanizer, AI Detector, plagiarism checker (with 25,000 words/month on Premium), summarizer (up to 6,000 words per pass), citation generator in 2,500+ styles, and a translator that works across 40+ languages. The extension itself supports 6 languages in the sidebar (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch), per the Chrome Web Store listing.
Pricing. In the India pricing page, Premium is ₹334 INR per month when billed annually with a Free tier at ₹0 (limited to 125-word paraphrases and 2 modes). QuillBot says more than 35 million writers use it worldwide. The Chrome Web Store shows 5,000,000 users, 5,600 reviews, and a 4.7 rating, with version 4.94.0 updated on July 11, 2026.
Real use case. You’re a non-native English speaker drafting a job application. You write the rough draft in your own voice. The QuillBot sidebar offers a tone shift to “Formal” - one click, the same meaning, but tighter phrasing. You tweak two words and send.
What I trust. QuillBot’s footer cites the Learneo parent company openly. The number of writers (35M) lines up with the 5M Chrome install base when you assume most users hit QuillBot through the web app or mobile rather than the extension.
Sources: quillbot.com/premium, quillbot.com homepage, Chrome Web Store - QuillBot listing (iidnbdjijdkbmajdffnidomddglmieko), Wikipedia: Course Hero (acquisition history).
7. ProWritingAid - the storytelling-first editor
Who builds it: Orpheus Technology Limited, based at International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London. The founder is Chris Banks, a former business writer who built the tool in 2013 to help him finish a novel about his travels in South America. ProWritingAid is bootstrapped - Orpheus’s own site says it has never taken VC money.
What you actually get. ProWritingAid is not a paraphraser. It’s an English editor with 25+ writing reports designed for long-form work: fiction, narrative nonfiction, business white papers. Reports cover readability, sticky sentences, overused words, pacing, dialogue tags, tense consistency, and “show-don’t-tell” detection. The browser extension works in Google Docs, Notion, Atticus, Medium, and most writing surfaces.
The Chrome Web Store listing says the developer “will not collect or use your data” - that’s a tighter privacy posture than most of the extensions on this list.
Pricing. Free caps you at a 500-word document at a time, 2 runs per report per day, and 10 Rephrases per day. Premium is ₹550 INR per month when billed annually (₹6,600/year). Premium Pro is ₹660/mo annual (₹7,920/year) and adds Sparks (50 per day), Chapter Critiques (3 per day), live workshops with published authors, and access to the 200+ workshop library. A lifetime tier is ₹21,945 one-time for Premium or ₹38,445 for Premium Pro.
The Chrome Web Store shows 200,000 users, 7,000 reviews, a 4.8 rating, and version 2.8.24339, updated July 8, 2026. ProWritingAid says 4 million writers use its products across all platforms.
Real use case. You finished the first draft of a 90,000-word novel. You paste chapter one into the web editor. The “Sticky Sentences” report flags 14 sentences over 35 words. The “Dialogue Tags” report catches three places you used “said” five times in a paragraph. You spend an hour cleaning those and move on.
Sources: prowritingaid.com, prowritingaid.com/pricing, prowritingaid.com/about-us, Chrome Web Store - ProWritingAid listing (npnbdojkgkbcdfdjlfdmplppdphlhhcf).
How I picked these seven
I filtered on three things, and I want to be specific so you can re-run the filter yourself:
- Verified Chrome Web Store presence with a recent update. Every extension on this list had a published update within the last 90 days, has a real publisher of record (not a single-developer alias with no track record), and discloses its privacy posture in line with Chrome’s 2024 limited-use requirements.
- Real pricing, not “Contact Sales.” If the only way to find out what it costs is to book a demo, it’s not on this list. Each entry has a public price I could quote.
- Distinct use case. I left out tools that overlap heavily with another entry - so no separate ChatGPT wrappers, no separate AI detectors, no separate transcription extensions. The seven here are the ones I would actually pay for, in seven different jobs-to-be-done.
If you want a tie-breaker metric: Chrome Web Store rating weighted by review count. Grammarly’s 4.5 over 43,100 reviews is a heavier signal than a 4.9 over 12 reviews. That’s why a 4.5 leads the list.
FAQ: which one should I actually install?
If you only install one, install Grammarly. It works in the most places, has the lowest learning curve, and now ships Superhuman Go for proactive help. The free tier alone covers 80% of what most people need day-to-day.
If you want one model-agnostic sidebar that pulls GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, install Merlin or MaxAI. Both work the same way; Merlin leans multilingual (128 languages) and MaxAI leans summarization and YouTube/PDF reading.
If you write anything longer than 500 words and care about craft, install ProWritingAid. Its reports catch things Grammarly doesn’t even try to.
If you’re a student or researcher, install SciSpace for reading papers, Liner for searching them, and QuillBot for paraphrasing. That’s the holy trinity.
If you’re a marketer or sales rep, install MaxAI for email replies and Merlin for the multi-model fallback when one provider rate-limits you mid-campaign.
Common pitfalls (read this before you install)
A few things that bit me while testing:
- Don’t stack all seven at once. Browser extensions share the same context menus, sidebars, and keybindings. Pick two or three and see how they coexist. Grammarly plus one of {MaxAI, Merlin} is a common pairing.
- Watch the credit burn. Liner and Merlin both meter usage. If you ask the most expensive model a thousand questions in a day, you’ll either burn your monthly credits in an afternoon or hit a daily cap and not know why the extension “stopped working.”
- Free-tier data retention is not enterprise-tier data retention. If you’re using these on work that includes customer data, IP, or anything regulated, read the privacy page. ProWritingAid’s “we never train on your text” stance is one of the strictest I found. Grammarly and QuillBot both sell Enterprise plans with data-loss-prevention and SAML SSO.
- The “AI Humanizer” arms race. Both QuillBot and Grammarly now ship features that claim to make AI-generated text look human. Your university, your editor, or your employer probably has an opinion about that. Read their policies.
Sources
- Chrome Web Store listings: Grammarly, MaxAI, Merlin AI, SciSpace Copilot, QuillBot, ProWritingAid - all retrieved July 2026.
- Grammarly plans (grammarly.com/plans), Grammarly “Becoming Superhuman” announcement (Shishir Mehrotra, October 29, 2025), Grammarly Go product page.
- MaxAI.me homepage and pricing page.
- getmerlin.in homepage and pricing page.
- liner.com pricing page, liner.com/scholar, liner.com/learn.
- typeset.io, typeset.io/copilot-chrome-plugin, typeset.io/pricing.
- quillbot.com/premium, quillbot.com homepage.
- prowritingaid.com, prowritingaid.com/pricing, prowritingaid.com/about-us.
- Wired, “Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature” (Miles Klee, March 4, 2026).
- The Verge, “Grammarly is changing its name to Superhuman” (Steve Bonifield, October 29, 2025).
- TechCrunch, “Grammarly rebrands to ‘Superhuman,’ launches a new AI assistant” (Ivan Mehta, October 29, 2025).
- Wikipedia: Grammarly (with sources cited).
- Wikipedia: Course Hero (acquisition history of QuillBot).
This article is maintained by AI Unpacker. Pricing and Chrome Web Store data verified on July 14, 2026. If a number looks off by the time you read this, ping us - the AI extension space moves weekly, and we update accordingly.