How to save Claude and Gemini chats to Obsidian

Keep your best Claude and Gemini conversations as searchable Markdown notes, with code blocks, tables and math intact.

AI chats are full of things worth keeping: explanations, decisions, snippets you'll need again. But the chat history is a poor place to keep them. It's hard to search, you can't link to it from your notes, and you don't control it.

Obsidian is a much better home, because every note is a plain Markdown file on your own disk. Here's how to get Claude and Gemini conversations in there cleanly.

What a good chat note looks like

Before choosing a method, it helps to know what you're aiming for:

• Clear turns. It should be obvious which parts you wrote and which parts the AI wrote.

• Code blocks with their language, so Obsidian highlights them:

  def greet(name):
      return f"Hello, {name}"
  

• Real tables, not lines of text that used to be a table.

• Math as LaTeX, like $O(\log n)$, which Obsidian renders natively.

• Frontmatter with the title, source and date, so you can find the note later.

The built-in exports

Claude: Settings → Privacy → Export data. You get an email with all your conversations as JSON. It's a complete backup, but you'd need a script to turn it into readable notes.

Gemini: your chats appear in Google's activity history and can be downloaded through Google Takeout. Again, that's a full archive rather than a note you can drop into a vault.

Both are worth doing once as a backup. Neither is meant for saving one useful chat as a note.

Copy and paste

Copying the visible page into a new note works, but you'll spend time fixing it. Typical problems: code blocks without a language, interface text such as "Copy" mixed into the content, and formulas that come out as plain text or appear twice.

One click with ChatGrab

ChatGrab reads the conversation that's open in your browser and turns it into a clean Markdown file in the format above.

1. Open the chat on claude.ai or gemini.google.com.
2. Click the ChatGrab icon.
3. Click Download .md and save it into your vault, or Copy Markdown and paste it into an existing note.

The free version covers this. Pro adds Obsidian frontmatter (title, source, URL, date and tags), lets you choose which messages to keep, and can export only the AI's replies when you don't need your own prompts.

It also works on ChatGPT, so all three end up in the same format.

Organising chat notes in your vault

A simple setup that works well:

• Keep exports in one folder, such as AI chats/.
• Use the frontmatter source field to filter by assistant.
• Link the chat from the note it relates to ([[Rust lifetimes chat]]) instead of copying parts of it around.
• Delete the chaff. Most chats aren't worth keeping; save the ones you'd be annoyed to lose.

Privacy

Your chats can contain personal or work details, so it matters where they go. ChatGrab processes everything inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no account. Your notes stay in your vault, on your own disk.