How to Summarize Webpages in Safari for Mac

One of the useful Apple Intelligence features that is available in Safari is the webpage summarization feature. With Apple Intelligence Summarize in Safari, you can have an AI summary of an entire webpage, whether it’s a long article, a general website, or anything else on the web, giving you a nice summary of the page contents. This can help you quickly determine information and save time, and it’s really easy to use in Safari on the Mac.

How to Use Summarize on Web Pages in Safari for Mac

If you have an Apple Silicon Mac with MacOS Sequoia 15 or later, you can use the great Summarize feature on any webpage, here’s how it works:

1. Open Safari on the Mac if you haven’t done so yet, then navigate to whatever webpage you wish to summarize (you can even try it on this one you’re reading right now)
2. After the page has loaded, look at the address bar and then click on the Reader button to the left of the URL, it looks like a box with a few lines under it



3. Click on “Show Reader”



4. Once in Reader mode, wait a moment and you will see a “Summarize” option appear at the top of the screen



5. You will soon see a summary of the webpage you are reading

Summarize works great on long articles, short articles, complex webpages, simple ones, and just about anything else on the web, and it can really save you time, or help you determine if a particular webpage or article is what you are interested in.

Summarization Unavailable Error? Try again

Like many features relating to AI, Apple Intelligence Summarize does not work 100% of the time, and you may occasionally get a failure during the Summarize attempt, receiving an error message instead of a webpage summary that may say “Summarization Unavailable – Something went wrong while trying to summarize this page. Try again later.”

If you see this error message, try again in a few moments and it usually works as expected. Often this error is triggered when there’s a connection disruption or some issue with connectivity between the Mac and Apple Intelligence cloud features, or even ChatGPT which is providing the summary.

Remember you must be online with an active internet connection, and have an Apple Intelligence compatible Mac (anything with an Apple Silicon M1 chip or better), to be able to use this feature.

If you do not have an Apple Silicon Mac, you can still get summarization features by using ChatGPT directly, either on the web (which should work with basically any device capable of using a web page), or with a compatible client, and asking ChatGPT to summarize a given URL, or contents of a particular webpage. ChatGPT also powers Apple Intelligence itself in many cases, so you’ll often get basically the same results. Don’t miss more handy ChatGPT tips if you’re interested.

This Summarization feature is covered on the Mac here, but it’s also available in Safari for iPhone and iPad too, on devices that support Apple Intelligence anyway.

Do you use the Summarize feature, or other Apple Intelligence features, on your Mac? What do you think of these AI tools? Let us know in the comments.