Summarize a long document
A summary prompt that names its reader and its budget — so you get the decisions and numbers that matter to you, not a shorter version of everything.
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Your prompt
Model-agnostic — works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any AI chat.
Why this prompt works
- →Naming the audience changes what survives the cut — the same report summarised "for a new hire" and "for the CFO" should keep different sentences, and the model can only do that if you say who is reading.
- →An explicit length budget beats "be concise": models pad vague requests and obey concrete ones.
- →"Preserve exact figures" targets the most common summary failure — numbers quietly rounded or dropped precisely where they carried the meaning.
Part by part
- Lead with the single most important takeaway
- Forces one thing to be identified as most important. A summary that opens with background makes the reader do the ranking themselves.
- Preserve exact figures and dates
- Numbers are what a summary loses first, because rounding genuinely reads better. It is a factual change disguised as an edit.
- do not round or paraphrase them
- Names the two mechanisms explicitly, which is more enforceable than asking for accuracy in general.
- If the document contradicts itself
- Asks for inconsistency to be surfaced rather than smoothed. A summary that resolves a contradiction silently is more confident than the source it came from.
Common mistakes
Summarise this document.Produces a proportional condensation — every section shortened equally — which buries the one thing that mattered under the sections that did not.
Give me the key points from this.Key points arrive as an unranked list, so the reader still has to work out which matters. Leading with a single takeaway is what makes a summary act as a summary.
Summarise this and keep it short.Without a stated audience, brevity is achieved by cutting detail rather than by cutting what this reader does not need. The two produce very different summaries of the same document.
Questions
Why does the audience matter?
Because it decides what can be assumed and what must be explained. The same document summarised for an engineer and for a board keeps different facts, and without a stated reader the model picks one for you.
Can I trust the figures it keeps?
Spot-check them. Models are considerably better at preserving numbers when told to than when not, and neither is a guarantee — anything you will repeat elsewhere is worth verifying against the source.
How long should the budget be?
State it in words or sentences rather than as short or brief. A specific budget produces a consistent length; a vague one produces whatever the model considers short that day.
What if the document is too long to paste?
Summarise in sections and then summarise the summaries, keeping figures at each stage. Accuracy degrades with each pass, so verify the numbers in the final version against the original rather than the intermediate.