Scan URL: let Kortlist fill the grid for you

You’ve just built a good comparison board. Twelve columns — CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, display, resolution, refresh, weight, battery, ports, webcam, price. Six candidates across the rows. Seventy-two cells staring back at you, and every one of them needs a trip to a spec sheet. This is the moment most comparison projects quietly die: the board is set up, the research isn’t done, and doing it by hand is an hour of tab-juggling no one has.

Scan URL is the answer. Paste a link, click one button, let Kortlist do the tab-juggling for you.

What Scan does

Open any item on your board, paste the product URL at the top of the modal, and click the Scan button on the right. A few seconds later, every cell the source page knew about is filled in — and the item’s images come with them.

The more columns on your board, the more Scan does for you. On a small four-column board it’s a nice shortcut. On a twelve-column spec sheet it’s the difference between doing the work and not.

Here’s that twelve-parameter laptop board, live and scorable. Thumb up what matters, thumb down what doesn’t, and watch the winner float to the top:

Imagine filling that board by hand versus pasting four URLs and clicking Scan four times — an afternoon against a minute.

How it works under the hood

No magic — just a careful pipeline with your board’s shape as the prompt.

When you click Scan, Kortlist fetches the page with a normal-looking browser request, then hands the content plus your exact column names to a fast Gemini model. The model doesn’t guess at a generic schema; it’s told “return JSON with keys CPU, RAM, SSD (GB), Weight (kg).” Because the extraction is tailored to your board, it doesn’t matter if the source site labels RAM as Memory — the model bridges the vocabulary.

Some sites block plain fetches. Cloudflare, Akamai and similar gatekeepers will turn away a server that isn’t a full browser. When that happens, Kortlist transparently falls back to a headless-browser service that can pass those challenges. Same board, same result, still one scan from your quota — the fallback is invisible to you.

And if a page genuinely doesn’t have any of your columns on it? You get a small “no matching fields” toast, and your scan isn’t counted. The token is refunded automatically. You only pay for scans that produced something.

Try it now — scans are on us

Every signed-in Kortlist account gets a pool of free scans every month. They cover how most people actually use Scan: the occasional board, a handful of items each.

If you’re doing research-heavy work — a shopping wall, a product-research shortlist, a hardware audit — you can buy a top-up pack from the Billing page in Settings. Three pack sizes, pay once, use them whenever. No subscription.

Prices move, so we keep them on the Billing page rather than in this post.

A few practical tips

Sign in first. Your free scan pool lives on your account, so Scan needs you signed in. Click it while signed out and Kortlist will send you through sign-in, then run the scan you meant.

Don’t close the tab mid-scan. The scan token is reserved on the server the moment you click the button. If you close the modal, close the tab, or navigate away before the result comes back, the token is spent with nothing to show. Kortlist does its best to warn you — a progress bar in the modal, a browser-native “are you sure” prompt on tab close — but the safest move is just to let the scan land. It usually takes seconds.

Always spot-check before saving. AI extraction is very good; it isn’t perfect. A product page’s “weight” field sometimes refers to the packaged weight; two competing specs on the same page can confuse any model. Scan is for the first-pass fill — the human review before you hit Save is still worth the thirty seconds it takes.

Another one — long list, different domain

Same pattern, different subject. Ten parameters across four mirrorless cameras: sensor, megapixels, max ISO, burst speed, IBIS, video, viewfinder resolution, weight, battery, price. A board like this used to mean ten browser tabs open side-by-side and a lot of copying and pasting:

Click Open in Kortlist, paste the manufacturer URL for any camera you’re considering, and add your own row — Scan will do the typing.

Your turn

Open app.kortlist.eu, build the board you’ve been putting off — the one with the ten columns you kept telling yourself you’d fill in tomorrow. Sign in, paste a URL, click Scan. Repeat for every row. The board that used to take an hour takes a minute.

There are free scans waiting on your account right now. Go use them.