Ultra Power / Guides / Bulk delete chats

How to bulk delete ChatGPT chats

ChatGPT has no multi-select. Its own interface gives you exactly two options: delete one chat from the menu on its row, or delete every chat you have ever had from Settings, Data controls, Delete all chats. Anything in between needs a browser extension that adds checkboxes to the sidebar. Here is how each route works, what to do before you start, and which one fits what you actually want.

Pick the route first

That third row is the one people miss. Archive all chats is directly above Delete all in the same settings tab, empties your sidebar just as completely, and every chat stays in Archived chats. If the goal is a clean list rather than destroyed data, archive is strictly the better button.

Before you delete a few hundred chats

• Export the ones you would miss. A deleted ChatGPT conversation cannot be recovered by anyone, so a copy you make now is the only copy that will exist. Markdown, plain text, JSON or PDF, one file for the whole selection.
• Check what "select all" means in the tool you are using. ChatGPT's sidebar only draws the chats you have scrolled to. An extension that ticks the visible rows is selecting forty chats, not your history.
• Know whether there is a way back. Deleting through ChatGPT's API is final. Whether a mistake is recoverable depends entirely on whether the extension keeps something in front of that.
• Watch out for project chats. ChatGPT mixes chats that belong to a project into the same list, so a clean-up can reach into a project you did not mean to touch.

Deleting a batch with Ultra Power

1. 1
   Select

   A checkbox on every row. Shift-click a second chat to take everything between the two. Select page takes the visible list, and Select all takes every chat in your history, including ones the sidebar has never drawn.

2. 2
   Narrow it down

   Type in the search box and select all only takes the matches. Or filter project chats out of the list entirely before you select anything.

3. 3
   Check the set

   Click into any chat to read it, untick the keepers. The selection is held by the extension rather than read back out of the page, so previewing, navigating and a hard reload leave it exactly as you left it.

4. 4
   Move to trash

   One action for the whole set. They vanish from your list and stay restorable for 12 hours, or 7 days on Pro. The Undo in the toolbar reverses the entire batch, and it is still there after a reload.

Verified in a browser: 300 selected, held through three chat previews, a forced sidebar re-render and a hard reload. Unticking two keepers left 298.

How long it takes, honestly

ChatGPT's API needs about three seconds per conversation and that is the floor for every tool doing this, ours included. What changes the total is running a batch in parallel instead of one after another: 200 chats lands around a minute, against roughly ten minutes of pure waiting one at a time, before you count 200 menus and 200 confirmations. Rate limits happen on big runs, so the job retries and backs off rather than failing the batch, and it reports what did not go through instead of claiming success.

Questions people ask at this point

Can I delete multiple ChatGPT chats at once without an extension?

Only all of them, through Delete all chats. There is no partial multi-select anywhere in ChatGPT's own interface, on the web or in the apps.

Is bulk deleting with an extension against ChatGPT's rules?

Ultra Power acts as you, on your own conversations, through the same endpoints the website uses when you click Delete. It does not scrape anyone else's data and it does not automate anything you are not entitled to do by hand. Still, it is your account: an extension with permission to delete your chats is a thing to install deliberately, from a listing you have read.

Will deleting free up my storage?

Storage is its own settings tab, with its own manage view broken out into files and images, and that is where an account's gigabytes usually sit. A chat clean-up and a storage clean-up are two different operations, so if the goal is space, start in the Storage tab rather than in the sidebar.

Can I get a deleted chat back?

Not one you deleted in ChatGPT. The full answer is here, including the two copies that can still save you.