For Notion
AI assistant for Notion — answers, with the receipts.
Sidenote is a Chrome extension that turns your Notion workspace into something that answers. Open a page, ask a question, click a citation — Sidenote takes you to the exact passage that proves the answer. Read-only, no admin install, nothing crawled until you open it.
The problem
Your workspace knows the answer. Finding it is the job.
Notion is where the decisions live — and where they get buried. The current spec, last quarter's spec and a half-finished draft all look the same in search, and the answer to “what did we decide?” is three linked sub-pages deep.
Sidenote doesn't replace Notion. It teaches it to answer — in your browser, on the pages you already have open, with citations you can verify in one click.
How it works
How Sidenote works on Notion.
Working across a set of related pages? Bundle them into a Collection and query the whole set at once — citations name the source page.
Use cases
What teams ask Notion — and how Sidenote answers.
- “Where's the launch checklist for this release?”Sidenote answers from the current project page and quotes the step — not the template you copied it from three quarters ago.
- “What did we actually decide in planning?”It reads the meeting notes and the decision log together, and cites the line where the call was made.
- “What's in the latest PRD for feature X?”PRDs sprawl across linked sub-pages. Sidenote pulls the requirement you asked about and points at the block it lives in.
- “What's our policy on Y?”Reads the team handbook page and quotes the clause that applies, with the date it was last edited.
- “I'm new — how does this team work?”New hires query the team wiki directly instead of interrupting a senior. Onboarding stops being a tax on everyone else.
- “Give me the TL;DR of this 40-block doc.”A long Notion page becomes a short, cited summary — every claim links back to the part of the page it came from.
Read-only by design
You choose what it reads. Nothing else.
Sidenote connects to Notion through the official API with read-only access, scoped to the pages you explicitly share. There's no workspace-wide crawl and no copy of every doc sitting on someone else's server. A page is only ever read once you open it.
Your Notion content stays in your account. Pages live behind row-level security in our UK (eu-west-2) Supabase region — no two accounts can read each other's chunks. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers we use; we never fine-tune models on user content.
Comparedvs Notion AIBuilt in and excellent — but per-seat and confined to Notion content. Sidenote answers across Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, PDFs and the open web, and every answer carries a citation you can click to the exact passage. vs pasting into ChatGPTCopy-paste loses the structure and the source. Sidenote ingests the page in place, checks every answer against the retrieved passages, and links each claim back to where it came from — so you can trust it.
Sidenote vs Notion AI.
Notion AI is great inside Notion. Sidenote is the cross-source reader that travels with you and proves its answers — designed to sit alongside Notion AI, not replace it.
FAQ
Common questions about Sidenote for Notion.
Does Sidenote need a Notion admin to install anything?
No. You connect Notion yourself through Notion's own authorisation flow and pick exactly which pages and teamspaces to share — read-only. There's no workspace-wide integration for an admin to approve, no internal tool to deploy. Each person connects their own access.
Can it read my private Notion pages?
Yes — the ones you choose to share. Sidenote reads through Notion's official API with read-only access, scoped to the pages you grant and tied to your own account. Pages you don't share stay invisible to Sidenote, exactly as Notion's own permissions intend.
Does Sidenote ingest my entire Notion workspace?
No. Sidenote is per-page and opt-in: a page is only indexed once you open it with the side panel active. There's no background crawl of your workspace and no global content store. Use Collections to bundle the handful of pages you do open into a set you can query in one go.
Is my Notion content used to train AI models?
No. Anthropic (the model provider) and Voyage AI (the embedding provider) both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers Sidenote uses, and Sidenote never fine-tunes models on user content. Your pages are used only to answer your own questions, stored in a UK (eu-west-2) region with row-level security isolating every account.
How is this different from Notion AI?
Notion AI is built into Notion — excellent inside Notion, sold as a per-seat add-on, and limited to Notion content. Sidenote rides along in your browser across Notion and everything else you read — Confluence, Google Docs, PDFs, articles — and grounds every answer in a citation that jumps to the source. The two happily coexist; Sidenote adds cross-source answers and verifiable citations.
Does it work with Notion teamspaces and wikis?
Yes. Any Notion page you can open and choose to share — personal pages, teamspace pages, wikis, databases rendered as pages — Sidenote can read and answer questions about, with a citation back to the block.
Try it on your workspace
Make your Notion answer back.
Add Sidenote to Chrome, connect Notion read-only, open a page, and ask the question you keep asking your team. No admin install. Free tier forever, 7-day Pro trial — no card required.
Read-only · You choose which pages to share