ClearWater — Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 19 May 2026

ClearWater is a browser extension that checks the quality and trustworthiness of text you read on the web. This page answers the questions people ask most — what it does, how to use it, what it can and cannot tell you, what it costs, and how your account works. It is written to be accurate to how the product actually behaves, not a generic sales page.

1. What is ClearWater?

ClearWater is a browser extension that reads a piece of text and tells you how well it holds up. You point it at text on a web page — an article, a forum post, a product description, a comment — and it returns a trust score plus an explanation. The goal is simple: help you see, quickly, whether a passage has real substance or is plausible-sounding emptiness.

It does not change the page, it does not block anything, and it never runs on its own. It only ever looks at text when you ask it to.

2. How do I use it?

There are three ways to give ClearWater something to check:

1. Check the whole page. Open the extension on an article and let it find the main text for you — you do not have to select anything.
2. Select a passage. Mark a specific part of the page — a sentence, a paragraph, a section — and check just that.
3. Paste your own text. Paste any text into the extension and check it, even if it is not on a web page at all.

Once you start a check, ClearWater analyses the text and shows you two things: a trust score for the passage overall, and in-page highlights that mark the specific weak or manipulative spots — so you can see not just that something is off, but where. A short written summary explains the verdict.

3. What does ClearWater detect?

ClearWater is built to catch the ways a text can look convincing without actually saying much. It flags things such as:

• Manipulation — emotionally loaded framing, pressure tactics, and rhetoric designed to push a conclusion rather than support it.
• Weak reasoning — gaps in logic, conclusions that do not follow, and arguments that contradict themselves.
• Unsupported claims — assertions presented as fact with nothing actually backing them.
• Low-substance filler — padding, vague generalities, and text that sounds informative but carries little real content.

You can also turn on a fact-check option, which lets ClearWater run a web search to corroborate the factual claims a text makes. With fact-check turned off, ClearWater judges only the structure of the reasoning — how the argument is built — and does not check whether the facts are true.

4. What can ClearWater not tell you?

This is the most important question, and the honest answer matters more than a reassuring one.

ClearWater judges the text that is in front of it. It cannot reliably judge what was left out.

The extension reads the words on the page — so it can tell you whether those words are coherent, concrete, well-reasoned, and not manipulative. What it cannot reliably do is detect what a writer deliberately omitted: the inconvenient fact left unmentioned, the missing counter-argument, the context quietly dropped, the question the text never raises.

A passage can be perfectly coherent, and every single sentence in it can be true, and the passage can still mislead you — by what it does not say. A half-truth is built from true parts. ClearWater is good at the parts that are present; it is structurally limited on the parts that are absent, because an omission leaves no text behind for any tool to examine. Turning on fact-checking does not close this gap: fact-checking corroborates the claims a text makes, not the ones it silently avoids.

So treat a ClearWater score as a strong, fast signal about a text's quality — not as a verdict on whether the text is the whole story. A high score means the text in front of you holds together well. It does not promise that nothing important was left out. Your own judgement is still required, and ClearWater is a tool to support it, not a replacement for it.

5. What does it cost?

ClearWater is pay-per-check. You keep a prepaid balance, and each check draws a small amount from it. The balance is denominated in US dollars.

Not every check costs the same. A quick, standard check is inexpensive. A deeper, more thorough analysis — one that examines a long text section by section, or runs a web search to fact-check it — does more work and therefore costs more. The extension shows you a cost estimate before a check runs, so there are no surprises, and it always tells you which mode you are about to use.

To add to your balance, you top it up with a prepaid amount. ClearWater accepts:

• PayPal.
• Cryptocurrency — Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), USDT on the TRON network, and Monero (XMR).

Whatever you pay with, your balance is tracked in US dollars: a crypto payment is simply converted to its dollar value when it is received.

6. Is there a free tier?

Yes. ClearWater gives you a small number of in-depth checks every day at no cost. The free allowance resets daily. For light, everyday use you may never need to pay at all — topping up a balance is entirely optional, and the extension is fully usable on the free daily checks.

7. How does my account work? Do I need to register?

There is no registration — no email, no password, no username. The first time the extension runs, the ClearWater server issues your browser a single account key. That key is your account: it stands in for a login and password, it identifies you to ClearWater, and it carries your balance — your free daily checks and any amount you have topped up.

Because the key is your account, two things follow:

• Keep a copy of it. You can view and copy your key from the extension at any time. If you reinstall your browser or move to a new computer, paste the saved key back in and your balance comes with it — your account is fully restorable from the key alone.
• Keep it private. Anyone who has your key can use the balance attached to it, so treat it like a password.

8. What happens to the text I check? Is it private?

To score a passage, ClearWater sends it to the ClearWater server, which analyses it and returns the result to your browser. On the public service, the text you submit is processed to produce the score and is not retained — it is not stored and not logged on the server afterward. ClearWater does not sell your data, shows no ads, and contains no advertising or analytics trackers.

There is one optional feature worth understanding: the community trust index. ClearWater can pool verdicts so the tool gets sharper as more people use it — but this sharing is your choice. You set it to one of three modes:

• Off — nothing is ever shared.
• On — after a check, an anonymous verdict is contributed to the shared index.
• Ask me each time — ClearWater asks before each contribution, so you decide case by case.

Even when sharing is on, your text itself is never sent to the trust index — only a one-way fingerprint of it, the score, and the page address. Full detail on data handling is in the Privacy Policy.

9. Which browsers does ClearWater support?

ClearWater runs on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Install it from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons, and it works the same way on both.

10. How do I get help or send feedback?

Questions, problems, or feedback can be sent to:

support@wecleantheinternet.com

For questions specifically about your data and privacy, see the Privacy Policy or write to privacy@wecleantheinternet.com.