PageGuide: Browser extension to assist users in navigating a webpage and locating information

Abstract

Users browsing the web daily struggle to quickly locate relevant information in cluttered pages, and complete multi-step web navigation tasks. State-of-the-art AI assistants (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and browser agents (e.g. OpenAI Operator, Browser Use) can answer questions and automate actions, yet they return answers without showing where the information comes from on the page, forcing users to manually verify results and blindly trust every automated step. We present PageGuide, a browser extension that grounds LLM answers and actions not only in HTML DOM elements, but also in non-HTML DOM content, such as maps, images, charts, and timetables, addressing two core user needs: (a) FIND: locating and highlighting relevant evidence in-situ so users can instantly verify answers on the page; (b)GUIDE: au tomatically guiding users through navigation tasks while capturing relevant evidence for each intermediate task. In a within-subject user study N=53, PageGuide outperforms a non-grounding agent in both modes: in FIND, it improves accuracy from 90.1% to 96.3% and reduces judge time from 155.6s to 133.0s; in GUIDE, it improves accuracy from 71.4% to 81.0%, with judge time rising from 70.4s to 109.8s as users spend the extra time inspecting grounded evidence across navigation steps rather than believing the answer blindly. Code and demo are at: https://pageguide.github.io/.