We built a Chrome extension to stop losing track of AI tools

AI Tools Explorer — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:08:02 +0000

We built a Chrome extension to stop losing track of AI tools

We test a lot of AI tools. Occupational hazard of running an AI tools directory.

The workflow was always the same. Find something interesting, open a tab, think "I'll come back to this," close the tab, forget it existed. Or worse, bookmark it in a folder with 300 other bookmarks and never find it again.

Notes apps didn't really fix it. You'd write "check out X tool, looks good for writing" and three weeks later have no idea what X tool actually did or whether you even tried it.

So we built something.

AI Tools Explorer for Chrome is a browser extension that lets you save any AI tool with a right-click. A small dialog opens with the URL and page title already filled in. You add a star rating, a quick note, any tags you want, and hit save. Done in about ten seconds.

Everything lives in the toolbar popup. Search by name, URL, note text, or tag. Filter by tag. Sort by date saved, rating, or title. Edit any entry whenever your opinion on a tool changes, because your first impression of a tool and your impression after actually using it for a week are rarely the same thing.

A few things we were firm about from the start:

No accounts. You shouldn't need to create an account to keep a personal list of tools you've tried.

No cloud sync. Everything stays in your browser using Chrome's built-in storage. Nothing is transmitted anywhere.

No data collection. Zero. There's no backend server, no analytics, no tracking of any kind.

We also added two features that come from running the directory:

A "Check on AI Tools Explorer" option in the right-click menu, so you can instantly search whether a tool is listed on our directory and read the full profile before saving it to your collection.

And a "Surprise me" button that pulls a random tool from the directory when you want to discover something new without a specific goal in mind.

It's free. No subscription, no premium tier. The extension is also open source.

If you're someone who evaluates AI tools regularly, whether you're building a stack, doing competitive research, or just genuinely curious about what's out there, this should make that process a lot less messy.

Chrome Web Store: AI Tools Explorer for Chrome

GitHub: https://github.com/AIToolsExplorer/ai-tools-explorer-chrome-extension

We'd love to hear what you think, and if there's a feature missing that would make it actually useful for your workflow, drop it in the comments.

We curated ~14,000 AI tools for 3 years. Here are the failure rates by category.

AI Tools Explorer — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0000

AI Tools Explorer is a manually curated directory of AI tools. We've been at it since 2023. Every tool is checked and vetted against editorial standards by a human. The ones that meet the bar get listed. The ones that later go offline get flagged during periodic re-checks rather than removed, preserving the failure record.

Over three years, that process covered over 14,000 tools across 20+ categories.

So we ran the numbers on failure rates by category for our listed tools and published the results.

The short version:

The AI shakeout is real, but it's very uneven. Some categories lost 25%+ of their tools. Others are still growing. The pattern correlates strongly with where hype-driven building happened versus where real user retention exists.

What's in the full analysis:

Category-by-category failure rates (2023 to mid-2026)
Three interactive Chart.js visualizations
Methodology and data sourcing
The pattern we're calling "The AI Shakeout"

Relevant for devs building in the AI tools space, especially if you're choosing which category to build in or evaluating the competitive landscape.

Full analysis: https://aitoolsexplorer.com/articles/ai-guides/ai-tool-failure-rate/

Would be curious to hear from anyone who's seen this pattern firsthand, either as a builder or a user of tools that disappeared.

DEV Community: AI Tools Explorer

We built a Chrome extension to stop losing track of AI tools

We built a Chrome extension to stop losing track of AI tools

We curated ~14,000 AI tools for 3 years. Here are the failure rates by category.