Everything ChatGPT Can Connect To

Chapter 1

The ChatGPT Plugin Directory Nobody Fully Scrolls Through

A consultant has six browser tabs open — Gmail, a client's Notion workspace, a shared Drive folder, a Slack channel, and a calendar that keeps double-booking two calls at once. She's already typed her question into ChatGPT, mostly out of habit, expecting she'll have to copy the answer somewhere else to actually act on it. This time she doesn't.

What she's found, without quite planning to, is chatgpt.com/plugins — a directory of apps that connect straight into a conversation rather than sitting in a separate tab. It isn't the plugin system ChatGPT shipped years earlier and mostly retired; the ones listed here are full connectors, each with its own install button, its own list of named skills, and its own account to log into. Gmail sits under Featured. So does Google Drive, Outlook Email, GitHub, SharePoint and Slack — the six most new visitors see first, because they're the six most people are already using anyway.

Scroll past Featured and the directory widens fast. Productivity holds tools for calendars, forms and note-taking. Developer Tools runs from GitHub through to database managers and no-code app builders. Business & Operations covers CRMs and sales pipelines and, three rows down past a stack of marketing analytics tools, a connector built purely for searching patents and trademarks. Data & Analytics reaches from spreadsheet-style querying to a tool built specifically for satellite imagery. Finance holds a connector for investment-banking workflows sitting one row above a crypto market-data tool. Entertainment, Travel, Healthcare, Security and Education & Research each hold their own smaller shelf — Entertainment, notably, includes a tarot-reading connector three rows from one that identifies songs by ear.

None of that breadth is obvious from ChatGPT's front door. A person who has only ever typed questions into the chat box has no reason to know that a Midpage Legal Research connector exists, or that Google Drive's connector reads comment threads as its own separate skill, or that two different companies list two different connectors for what looks like the same job — Outlook Email and Superhuman Mail both promise a faster inbox, filed under two different categories.

That's the gap this book closes: not what ChatGPT is, which most people already know, but what this one directory actually holds once you stop scrolling past it. The chapters ahead walk through how connecting an app changes what ChatGPT can see and do, how the category structure works and where it repeats itself, and which connectors are worth installing before the next six browser tabs pile up. A map of the most useful ones follows right after this chapter, organized by what they're actually for.

What you can actually do here

Fourteen connectors worth knowing about first, grouped by the kind of day they actually serve rather than by where the directory happens to file them.

Running the day-to-day work

Work that doesn't fit the usual categories

Life outside the desk

Chapter 2

What Happens the Moment You Connect an App

Somebody's cursor sits over the 'Install plugin' button on the Gmail connector page a few seconds longer than it needs to. It's a fair pause — the button doesn't just open an inbox, it opens a relationship between two systems, and the page underneath it says so directly.

Every connector page in the directory — Gmail, Notion, GitHub, SharePoint, all of them — carries the same block of information text, worth reading once properly rather than skimming a dozen times. Once connected, ChatGPT may share relevant chats and memories with that app to provide context for a request. The app's own use of that shared data is governed by its own terms and privacy policy, not ChatGPT's. If Memory is switched on, data coming back from the app may be used later to proactively surface suggestions, unprompted. And connecting any app is described, in the same sentence every time, as carrying 'elevated risk' — a phrase that doesn't change no matter which of the dozens of connectors it sits under.

What does change, connector to connector, is the shape of what gets shared. A connector built around a single app — Slack, Gmail — has one skill and one clear boundary. Google Drive splits into five named skills: Google Docs, Google Drive itself, Google Drive Comments, Google Sheets and Google Slides — meaning a request to search comment threads pulls from a narrower slice of an account than a request to search every file in it. Google Calendar splits further still, into Daily Brief, Free Up Time, Group Scheduler and Meeting Prep — each a different kind of access to the same calendar.

None of this reads as a warning exactly. It reads more like fine print that happens to matter. The practical upshot for anyone about to connect an app: check what skills that specific connector lists before assuming it can only do the one thing its one-line description promises, and know that disconnecting it later — every page states this too — is always available from settings.

The category structure the directory uses to organize all of this is the next piece worth understanding, because it changes how easy any of these connectors are to find again once you know they exist.

Chapter 3

More Than a Dozen Categories, and Why Some Apps Sit in Several

Someone looking for the GitHub connector a second time goes back to Featured, where they first noticed it — and it isn't there anymore, because Featured isn't a fixed category, it's a rotating shortlist pulled from across all the others. GitHub is filed permanently under Developer Tools; Featured just borrowed it for a while.

The directory runs just over a dozen categories: Featured, Productivity, Creativity, Developer Tools, Business & Operations, Data & Analytics, Communication, Education & Research, Security, Finance, Healthcare, Travel, Entertainment, and a catch-all Other for anything that doesn't fit — currently home to a shopping connector and a podcast-finder, sitting together for no reason beyond not belonging anywhere else.

A handful of connectors are filed in more than one place at once, and it's worth knowing which, because it changes how you'd ever stumble onto them. Google Drive appears under both Featured and Productivity. GitHub appears under Featured and Developer Tools. Slack, Gmail, Outlook Email and SharePoint all do the same — each earning a spot in Featured because it's popular, while its permanent home sits one category over. Amplitude shows up under both Business & Operations and Data & Analytics, because product intelligence genuinely straddles both jobs.

The categories themselves are unevenly sized. Productivity and Business & Operations run long, each holding dozens of entries once you scroll past the first screen. Finance, by contrast, holds five connectors total — spanning investment-banking workflows, public-equity research, crypto market data and payments — small enough that a specialist could read every entry in under a minute.

None of this categorization is explained anywhere on the page itself; it's simply the shape the directory takes once you look past the first row. Knowing it matters practically: if a connector solves a genuinely narrow problem, the smaller categories — Security, Finance, Healthcare — reward reading in full, because there's little else competing for attention inside them. The larger ones reward searching by task rather than browsing top to bottom.

The next two chapters split those categories a different way — not by where the directory happens to file them, but by what kind of day they're actually built for.

Chapter 4

The Apps Built for Getting Work Done

An engineer at a five-person startup is trying to close out a pull request before a demo in an hour, and the check that's failing isn't something they wrote — it's failing inside GitHub Actions, three tabs away from the code itself.

The GitHub connector lists four skills: Review Follow-up, CI Debug, GitHub, and Publish Changes. CI Debug is built for exactly this moment — reading the Actions log, finding what broke, and handing back a fix without leaving the conversation. The page is specific about how it does this: connector-first, with only 'targeted CLI fallbacks,' meaning it prefers the connector's own data over raw git commands wherever it can. It's also worth knowing GitHub and GitHub Enterprise are listed as two separate apps under one connector page — connecting a personal account does not connect a company's self-hosted Enterprise instance.

Around that one connector sits a full shelf of tools built for the same kind of day. Notion's connector runs four named skills — Knowledge Capture, Meeting Intelligence, Research & Documentation, and Spec to Implementation — the last built specifically for turning a written spec into an implementation plan, rather than the more generic 'search my Notion' most people would assume. SharePoint's connector goes the other direction: one skill, but built to summarize a whole site, identify who owns what, and plan a safe update across documents, spreadsheets and decks before anyone touches them.

Business & Operations runs its own version of the same idea. Sales workflows, CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce, and — three rows down from a job-search connector — a Patent Connector built purely for searching patents and trademarks, which nothing else in the directory duplicates. Data & Analytics carries the tools for the step after that work is done: BigQuery for warehouse queries, Mixpanel and Amplitude for product usage, and a scattering of narrower tools built for one job each, from marketing-data aggregation to satellite imagery analysis.

What connects all of it is the same design choice repeated connector to connector: a one-line pitch on the category page, and a much more specific set of named skills underneath it that the pitch never fully captures. Reading past the pitch is where the actual capability shows up.

Chapter 5

The Apps Built for Everything Outside the Job

Three tabs are already open before a trip has even been booked — one comparing flights, one for the hotel, one trying to work out whether the trail near the destination is actually walkable this time of year. All three jobs have their own connector inside the Travel category: Skyscanner for comparing fares, Expedia for flights and hotels together, and Wikiloc for the trail itself. None of the three talk to each other; each is installed and used on its own.

Travel is one of the smaller, less obvious categories in the directory, and the same is true of Healthcare, Education & Research, Entertainment and Security — the shelves someone only finds once they've stopped assuming ChatGPT's connectors are only for spreadsheets and email. Healthcare holds a calorie tracker, a meal-planning tool, and a connector for pulling in data from COROS fitness devices specifically, separate from a more general health-data connector sitting next to it that reads across whatever health data a phone already stores. Someone training for something specific gets more out of the COROS-specific one; someone just trying to eat better gets more out of the general tracker.

Education & Research holds tools built for two different audiences filed on the same shelf: Consensus and SciSpace, both built for exploring scientific papers, sit two rows above Midpage Legal Research, a connector built for legal research specifically — case law and filings, not journal articles. Nothing on the category page separates the two audiences; the connector names do that work instead.

Entertainment is the smallest and strangest shelf. Apple Music for building playlists sits a few rows from Shazam for identifying a song, and both sit next to a tarot-reading connector with no stated connection to either. It's a reminder that this directory isn't curated by theme so much as by whoever built a connector and submitted it.

Security, by contrast, is narrow and purposeful: a handful of connectors for verifying links, domains and phone numbers, checking compliance posture, and auditing who has access to a shared Google Drive. Nobody would think to look for a security tool inside a directory built around a chat window — which is exactly why it's worth one deliberate scroll, once, before assuming the risk-checking has to happen somewhere else entirely.

Chapter 6

Where the Directory Runs Out of Answers

The plugins directory answers 'what exists' in more detail than almost anywhere else on chatgpt.com. It answers 'what does this cost, beyond the ChatGPT plan itself' nowhere at all.

Every connector page repeats the same privacy language, the same install button, the same short skill list — and stops there. There's no pricing comparison across connectors, no help center explaining what happens when two connected apps conflict over the same task, and no walkthrough of a first connection step by step. A person deciding whether the GitHub connector is worth setting up for a five-person team gets a one-line pitch and a skill list; what it costs to run GitHub itself, or whether the connector adds any usage limit of its own, isn't part of what this directory states.

The category structure has its own honest limit too. Featured is a rotating shortlist, not a ranking — nothing on the page says how an app earns a spot there or how long it stays. One connector inside Data & Analytics appears twice with two slightly different taglines for what looks like the same tool, a small sign that the whole list is built from submissions rather than reviewed line by line, which means the quality bar between one connector and its neighbor can vary more than the uniform page design suggests.

What the directory does deliver, reliably, is breadth: a working connection into tools somebody already uses, described plainly enough to install without guesswork. The decision actually left to the reader isn't whether ChatGPT can reach Gmail or GitHub or a patent database — it clearly can. It's whether reaching them through one more login, with the same 'elevated risk' notice on every page, is worth it for the specific task in front of them right now.

If the goal is pulling three or four scattered tools into one conversation — Drive, Calendar, an inbox — the directory earns its keep almost immediately. If the goal is a single narrow task solved once, installing a connector for it is often more setup than the task itself needs. And if the deciding factor is cost or a usage limit, that answer sits on the connected app's own site, not on chatgpt.com/plugins — which is the one thing this directory, for all its breadth, never states.

Questions readers actually ask