Blog  ·  28 July 2026

How to summarise a web page without sending it anywhere

Summarising an article is the single most common thing people use AI for on a phone. It is also the one where the tool quietly ships the page — and sometimes the page behind your login — to somebody else's server.

Most summarising tools work by sending the page, or its URL, to a service that fetches and processes it. For a public news article that is unremarkable. It becomes more interesting when the page is an internal wiki, a document behind a login, a shared draft, or a client's staging site.

Doing the summary on the phone removes that question entirely. The text is read and condensed locally, so what you were reading stays between you and the page.

The setup, once

The version worth having is one tap from the share sheet, so it competes with actually reading the thing:

1. Install the assistant and set it up on Wi-Fi. This is the only step that needs a connection.
2. Open Shortcuts and create a new Shortcut. Add the summarise action from OnDevice LLM.
3. Turn on "Show in Share Sheet" and set it to accept web pages.
4. Pass the Shortcut Input into the text field. That is the whole configuration.

From then on: Share → your Shortcut → summary. There are more variations of this in private AI inside Apple Shortcuts.

Asking for the right kind of summary

"Summarise this" is the weakest instruction available, and it is the one everybody uses. The output improves immediately when you say what the summary is for:

• "Three bullet points, no preamble." For triage — deciding whether to read it.
• "What is the argument, and what is the evidence?" For opinion pieces, where the structure matters more than the topic.
• "List every number and what it refers to." For reports.
• "What does this ask me to do?" For anything long and administrative.
• "Explain it as if I already know the field." Kills the introductory padding.

A useful habit: keep two Shortcuts rather than one. A "triage" summary that is brutally short, and a "digest" one that is a few paragraphs. They are used at completely different moments.

What to watch out for

• Paywalls and login walls. If the share sheet only passes what was actually rendered, a partly-loaded page produces a partial summary. Let the page finish loading.
• Navigation and cookie banners. Junk in, junk out. Reader mode before sharing gives noticeably cleaner results.
• Very long pages. Better handled in sections than in one pass.
• Summaries are lossy by definition. Fine for deciding whether to read something. Not a substitute for reading anything you are going to act on.
• It does not fact-check. A confident summary of a wrong article is a confident wrong summary.

Where this beats a cloud summariser

Not on raw quality — a large cloud model will usually write a better summary. It beats it on three specific things:

• Pages that should not be uploaded. Internal tools, client sites, anything behind a login.
• No connection. A saved article on a flight still summarises.
• No metering. No credits, no per-request cost, no rate limit at the moment you need it.

For a public news article, use whatever is best. For everything else, the local one is a better default — and once it is on the share sheet, it is the one you will reach for anyway.

What you need

An iPhone or iPad on iOS 17 or later, plus one-time setup on Wi-Fi. Will it run on my iPhone? covers what suits your device.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated: 28 July 2026