This blog post explains a common interaction you may encounter when using AI assistants for article summaries: the assistant cannot fetch content directly from a specific URL and asks you to paste the article text so it can proceed.
I’ll outline why that happens, what information you should provide for a high-quality summary, and safe, efficient ways to share content with an AI while respecting legal and privacy constraints.
Why the assistant asks you to paste the article text
When an AI responds that it “can’t access the content from that specific URL,” it usually means the system has no web-browsing or scraping capability for that site at that time.
Many platforms intentionally restrict live web access to ensure privacy, avoid scraping-protected or paywalled content, and to control the provenance of information used in responses.
Other technical reasons include dynamic or JavaScript-rendered pages, sites blocked by robots.txt, authentication walls, or content behind paywalls and subscriptions.
The assistant’s request to paste the article is a practical workaround: it lets the model process the exact text you want summarized without attempting to fetch it itself.
Common causes of inaccessible URLs
Typical causes include:
How to provide the article text for an accurate summary
To get the best result, paste the article text directly into the chat and include a few guiding details: what length of summary you want, which points you care about, and the intended audience.
Clear instructions save time and improve accuracy.
Keep formatting simple and include metadata if possible—author, date, headline—so the summary can be contextualized.
If the article is very long, indicate which sections are most important or paste an excerpt up to the assistant’s input limit.
Practical tips for pasting content
Here’s a short checklist to streamline the process.
Legal, privacy, and ethical considerations
Before pasting content, ensure you have the right to share it.
Do not paste sensitive personal data or copyrighted material you’re not permitted to reproduce.
Summarization may be considered a transformative use, but copyright laws vary by jurisdiction and context.
If unsure, share a short excerpt and a link or request a high-level summary instead.
Alternatives if you can’t paste the article
If pasting isn’t an option, consider these alternatives: provide a brief manual summary or extract key quotes or data points. You can also share a DOI or citation, or request help drafting questions to ask the article’s authors or publisher.
These approaches let the assistant help without needing raw article text.
Here is the source article for this story: Extreme Weather Texas