Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://www.rhetoricaudit.com/docs/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

The Rhetoric Audit Chrome extension runs quietly in your browser and scores news articles as you read them. Without leaving the page, you get an ambient signal showing the article’s manipulation risk — and one click opens the full 15-parameter forensic panel, complete with PDF export.
Version status: v3.3.0 is currently under Chrome Web Store review. The published version is v2.2.0. Once v3.3.0 is approved, your extension updates automatically. v3.4.0 — which adds the Detection Confidence widget and cross-platform corroboration badge — is staged for upload immediately after.

​
Install the extension

1

Open the Chrome Web Store listing

Go to the Rhetoric Audit extension page in Chrome.
2

Add to Chrome

Click Add to Chrome, then confirm by clicking Add extension in the dialog. The Rhetoric Audit icon appears in your toolbar.
3

Sign in to your account

Click the toolbar icon. In the popup, sign in with your email and password or continue with Google. Signing in syncs all your analyses to the dashboard and raises your daily scan limit from 10 to 50.
4

Browse to a news article

Navigate to any news or opinion article. The extension activates automatically when it detects article content on the page.

​
How to use the extension

Once installed, the extension works without any manual setup. Here is the typical workflow: 1. See the ambient pill indicator. As soon as the extension scores an article, a small pill appears near the top of the page showing the Propaganda Index score. This happens in the background — you do not need to click anything. 2. Click the toolbar icon for the full report. Click the Rhetoric Audit icon in your Chrome toolbar to open the forensic panel. The panel loads inside the page and shows all 15 diagnostic parameters. 3. Read the full analysis. Scroll through the panel to see the Bias Spectrum slider, Fallacy Density Index with expandable logic fractures, Emotional Resonance Triad, Strategic Silence summary, and the PhD Analytical Deduction synthesis. 4. Export or share. Click GENERATE FULL FORENSIC AUDIT (PDF) at the bottom of the panel to download a formatted report. Use the share button to copy a shortlink to the analysis.

​
Key features

Ambient pill indicator

A score pill appears on article pages automatically, showing the Propaganda Index without requiring you to open the panel.

Full forensic panel

Click the toolbar icon to open the complete 15-parameter analysis: bias spectrum, fallacy density, emotional resonance, strategic silence, source reliability, and more.

PDF export

Generate a formatted PDF of the full forensic audit directly from the panel — useful for sharing, archiving, or citing in research.

Detection Confidence widget

Coming in v3.4.0: a widget showing how confident the FME engine is in its overall scoring for that article.

Cross-platform badge

Coming in v3.4.0: a badge showing corroboration signals pulled from X, News, and the open web via the Stage 1.6 pipeline.

Scan syncing

Every analysis you run while signed in is saved to your Rhetoric Audit dashboard, where you can search, filter, and revisit past scans.

​
Connecting to your account

The extension popup serves as your account hub.
  • Signed out: You get 10 anonymous scans per day (resets at 00:00 UTC). Sign in to raise this to 50 scans per day and enable scan history sync.
  • Signed in: Your email, connection status, and remaining credits are displayed in the popup. Click Open Dashboard to jump straight to your analysis history.
  • Credits low: A top-up link appears in the popup when your credits are running low.
Sign in using your Rhetoric Audit email and password, or use Continue with Google for one-click authentication.

​
Permissions explained

Allows the extension to read the content of the tab you are currently viewing when you click the toolbar icon. The extension does not read tabs in the background or tabs you have not explicitly activated.
Required to inject the pill indicator and forensic panel into the article page. Without this permission, the ambient overlay and in-page panel cannot be displayed.
Stores your authentication token and cached analysis results locally so you stay signed in between browser sessions and so repeated visits to the same article do not consume extra credits.
Adds a right-click menu option so you can trigger an analysis from the context menu in addition to clicking the toolbar icon.
Used by the share button to copy the analysis shortlink to your clipboard. The extension only writes to the clipboard when you explicitly click share.
Rhetoric Audit is built on Manifest V3, Chrome’s current and most security-focused extension standard. No background network requests are made without your interaction, and your browsing history is never collected.

​
Troubleshooting

The extension doesn’t activate on a page. The extension detects article content using standard page signals. It may not activate on paywalled pages (where the article text is hidden), login-gated content, PDFs opened in Chrome, or pages with very little body text. Navigate to the publicly accessible version of the article and try again. The pill indicator isn’t appearing. Make sure you are signed in or have anonymous scans remaining. If your daily quota is exhausted, the pill will not appear until you sign in or until the quota resets at 00:00 UTC. You can check your remaining scans in the popup. The forensic panel shows “No article content detected.” This state appears on pages the extension identifies as non-article pages — home pages, search results, social feeds, and similar. Navigate directly to a specific article URL. An error message appears in the panel. Try refreshing the page and clicking the icon again. If the error persists, check your internet connection. Analysis requires a live call to the Rhetoric Audit API.
If the extension stops working after a Chrome update, go to chrome://extensions, find Rhetoric Audit, and toggle it off and back on to reload it.