RealityCheck is live! My fourth Chrome extension. It tells you what a webpage is hiding.
Two weeks ago I posted about getting two job rejections in two days and building anyway. I teased something sharp was coming.
It's live now.
RealityCheck is a sceptical reasoning layer for the web. Not a summariser. Not a fact checker. Something different.
The modern web is engineered to make you believe things before you've had a chance to think. Landing pages, opinion articles, health claims, finance content, AI hype all of it designed to persuade first and inform second.
RealityCheck reads any page and tells you what it's trying to make you believe, what claims have no evidence behind them, what's being hidden, who benefits if you trust it, and what a sceptical expert would ask.
Six modes. Manipulation score from 0 to 100. Evidence cards showing exactly what the page said and why it's suspicious. Concrete and specific, not "this page may be biased" but "this page claims 500,000 users with no source and uses three urgency phrases with no verifiable deadline."
Free tier gets Hype mode with 5 analyses per day. Essential at £7/month unlocks all six modes unlimited. BYOK = your API key stays in your browser. Same model as every HelixLabs product.
Four extensions now. Prompt Helix understands pages. FocusForge controls attention. CookieNuke protects privacy. RealityCheck exposes manipulation.
Chrome Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/realitycheck/adfhglaacmpfkcneopdmldcolmgdijim
helixlabs.studio
What's the most manipulative type of page you regularly encounter online?
The "what is this page trying to make you believe + who benefits if you trust it" framing is sharper than "fact checker," and the concrete output ("claims 500K users with no source, 3 urgency phrases") is the right call. Specificity is the whole value here.
One honest tension: the people who'd install a manipulation detector are already the skeptical ones who don't need it. The people who'd benefit most (those who get persuaded easily) won't seek out a tool that adds friction to their browsing. That's the distribution wall for this category. Worth thinking about whether the wedge is "protect skeptics' time" (they want it fast) vs "convert the persuadable" (much harder reach).
Which user are you seeing actually install so far?