Core Concepts
Bookmarks, Sessions, Archives, Summaries — the mental model.
LinkVolv has four primitives. Once they click, the rest of the app is obvious. This page is the shortest tour of all four.
The mental model
Every page you save lives as a Bookmark. Bookmarks can be grouped into Sessions, archived as frozen Archives, and indexed into Summaries and Embeddings by the AI pipeline. That is the entire object model.
Bookmarks
A Bookmark is the atomic unit. It always has a URL, a title, and a timestamp. The AI pipeline adds a summary, a list of key points, suggested tags, and a vector embedding for semantic search.
- Created via the browser extension, the dashboard paste box, or by sharing from a mobile share sheet.
- Belongs to a single workspace (yours), and optionally to one or more Sessions.
- Searchable by keyword (Free) or by semantic intent (Pro).
Sessions
A Session is a frozen snapshot of related browser state. Think of it as a labelled folder of tabs, except it remembers scroll positions and history. You save a Session when you finish a research push and want to clear the deck without losing context.
When to use a Session
Archives
An Archive is a stored copy of a page’s content captured at the moment you saved it. Archives protect against link rot — even if the original URL goes 404, the article is still readable in LinkVolv.
Archives are a Pro and Lifetime Plus feature, with a generous storage budget per plan.
Summaries & embeddings
These are derived data: produced from the page content by the AI pipeline, attached to the Bookmark, and used in search.
Summaries
A 2–3 sentence overview plus a bulleted list of takeaways. Summaries are designed to be skimmable — you should be able to tell within five seconds whether a saved page is what you remember it being.
Embeddings
A vector representation of the page’s meaning. Stored in a vector database and queried whenever you run a semantic search. Free users do not have access to vector search; their library is searched by keyword across titles, summaries, and key points.
How they fit together
- You save a URL. A Bookmark is created.
- The AI pipeline reads the page, produces a Summary and an Embedding, and writes them back onto the Bookmark.
- Optionally, the page is captured as an Archive.
- Optionally, the Bookmark is grouped into one or more Sessions.
Everything else in the product — search, dashboards, restores — operates over those four primitives.