An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files, so a saved chat fits right in. The questions are how the chats get there, and whether the notes stay current when you keep chatting.
Set it up in two minutes
- Add Chat to Markdown to Chrome or Edge. The welcome page opens.
- Click Choose a folder and pick a folder in your vault for the chats, such as a new
AI Chatsfolder. Each service gets a folder inside it. Picking the vault itself works too: then set a subfolder in Settings, or the service folders sit at the top of the vault. - When Chrome asks if the extension may keep editing the folder, choose Allow on every visit. Otherwise Chrome asks again after every restart.
- Turn on ChatGPT on the same page (Chrome asks to allow chatgpt.com) and stay signed in to chatgpt.com in this browser.
- Press Start saving. Within a minute, your latest chats appear in Obsidian’s file list.
After that, it runs on its own every 3 hours. You can change this to anything from every 15 minutes to once a day, pick set times such as 9:00 and 18:00, or keep it to working hours. To save the open chat right now, click Save next to Share on chatgpt.com.
What the notes look like
Each chat is one note, named 2026-10-17 Lisbon food trip.md by default. Its frontmatter shows up as Obsidian properties:
- title, source (ChatGPT) and model
- created and updated, in the date-time format Obsidian recognises
- url back to the chat, and the chat’s id, which is how a note is matched to its chat
- tags:
ai-chatandchatgpt
Below that, your messages are under ## You and the answers under ## ChatGPT, so Obsidian’s outline lists every turn. Code stays in fenced blocks with syntax highlighting. If you turn on Model thinking in Settings → What to save, it is saved as a folded [!abstract] callout that opens with a click.
You can write in the note. The conversation sits between two HTML comments. Anything you add above or below them stays through every update, and so do properties you add yourself, like rating or aliases. Each update keeps the version before in a hidden .chattomarkdown folder, which Obsidian doesn’t list, and the extension’s reader shows what changed.
Folders, tags and daily notes
- Projects become folders. A chat in a ChatGPT Project is saved to
AI Chats/ChatGPT/Project name/. - Leave out private chats. Add words like “salary” or a whole project to the skip list in Settings, and those chats are never written.
- Daily note links. Turn it on and each day’s chats are linked from that day’s daily note, so they show up in your journal and in the graph.
- Your own format. Change the file name pattern (
{date},{title},{project}and more), the date format, which properties are written, and add your own tags.
A table of all your chats
With the community plugin Dataview installed, this block lists every saved chat, newest first:
```dataview
TABLE source, model, updated
FROM "AI Chats"
SORT updated DESC
```Swap the folder for #chatgpt to filter by tag, or add WHERE contains(file.name, "Lisbon") to narrow it down.
Without an extension
For one chat now and then, copy the conversation from the page and paste it into a note. With Settings → Editor → Auto convert HTML turned on (the default), Obsidian turns the pasted formatting into Markdown. You lose the question and answer labels and the date, and the note never updates. For a single chat, that is often enough.
ChatGPT’s data export (Settings → Data controls → Export data) gives you every chat at once, as JSON. See how to export ChatGPT chats to Markdown for what is inside it.