The structured, machine-readable representation Chrome builds from a page's rendering tree when a tab is shared with Gemini. It captures every visible element — text, links, images, forms, tables — as a tree of content nodes, each tagged with geometry, styling, interaction data, and a unique node ID
The structured, machine-readable representation Chrome builds from a page's rendering tree when a tab is shared with Gemini. Rather than sending raw HTML, Chrome walks its internal rendering tree — the version of the page that reflects what's actually visible on screen after all CSS, layout, and JavaScript has been applied — and produces a tree of content nodes.
Each node in the tree is classified as one of 21 types: Root, Container, Text, Paragraph, Heading, Anchor, Image, SvgRoot, Canvas, Video, Form, FormControl, Table, TableRow, TableCell, OrderedList, UnorderedList, ListItem, Iframe, DialogModal, and DialogModeless. Every node carries geometry data (bounding boxes in viewport coordinates), text styling (size, emphasis, color), interaction metadata (whether it's clickable, focusable, disabled, and why), and a unique sequential node ID.
Privacy protections are applied during extraction. Password field values are redacted, cross-origin iframe content is replaced with origin-only metadata, and paywalled content is flagged using schema.org markup detection.
The resulting tree can be output as JSON, plain text, cleaned HTML, passage-sized chunks for LLM context windows, or structured Markdown where every element is tagged with a node ID reference like {#14}. This last format is what enables Gemini to not only read the page but interact with it — clicking buttons, filling forms, and following links by referencing specific node IDs.
