Quick clean-up vs. Smart rewrite, and when to trust each one
The optimizer on this site offers two buttons, and it is easy to assume they are the same feature with different marketing — one free, one "AI-powered" as a upsell. They are not. They work by entirely different mechanisms, and knowing which is which decides how much you should trust the result.
Quick clean-up is a fixed list, not a model#
Quick clean-up never leaves your browser and never calls anything. It is a short, specific list of substitutions: "in order to" becomes "to," "due to the fact that" becomes "because," a handful of filler openers like "I was just wondering if you could" collapse to "Please." It trims repeated whitespace. That is the entire rule set.
The consequence worth knowing: if your prompt does not happen to contain one of those specific phrases, Quick clean-up will save close to nothing — not because it failed, but because there was nothing on its list to remove. A prompt full of genuine, meaningful padding written in a way the list does not recognize will come back unchanged. That is correct behavior, not a bug: a rule that only fires on phrases it can positively identify is exactly what makes it safe to apply blindly. It cannot rewrite your meaning, because it never reads for meaning at all.
Smart rewrite reads the prompt#
Smart rewrite sends your text to a model (Gemini) with one instruction: preserve meaning and intent exactly, while using as few tokens as possible. This is where the real compression lives, because a model can restructure a sentence, drop context that's implied elsewhere, and merge redundant clauses — none of which a fixed substitution list can safely do without risking a meaning change.
The trade-off is exactly what you'd expect from sending text somewhere: it takes a network round trip, and it depends on an upstream service that can occasionally be unavailable. When it is, the tool serves you the Quick clean-up result instead of an error — you get the safe, free option automatically rather than nothing.
When to reach for which#
Use Quick clean-up first, always. It costs nothing, takes no time, and can never make your prompt worse. Run it before anything else.
Reach for Smart rewrite when the savings actually matter — a prompt you'll send thousands of times, or one long enough that a few percent is real money. For a one-off question, the difference is rarely worth the wait.
Read the badge on the result. If Smart rewrite is unavailable and the tool falls back to Quick clean-up, the savings number you see is the safe floor, not the ceiling — a temporarily unavailable AI rewrite does not mean your prompt has no more fat to trim, only that this particular pass couldn't find it.
What neither one will do#
Neither button will touch a fenced code block, inline code, or a URL — both treat those as content to preserve exactly, not prose to compress. If your prompt is mostly code or a link, don't expect much movement from either button; that's protecting you from a rewrite quietly breaking something that has to remain byte-exact.
Is Smart rewrite free to use?#
Yes — there's no separate charge for using it on this site. It calls an AI provider behind the scenes, but that cost isn't passed to you; the only thing you're spending is the small delay of a network round trip compared to the instant, local Quick clean-up.