It tells the story of a woman named Delaney Wells who joins The Every, a company formed by a merger between The Circle and an e-commerce giant known as "the jungle" (a thinly-disguised version of Amazon).

Delaney Wells, a former forest ranger from Idaho, interviews at The Every, a software company headquartered on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

As part of her interview, she enlists her friend and housemate Wes Makazian to create a prototype for an application that can determine whether a person you are talking to is telling the truth.

During each of these rotations, she proposes ideas, brainstormed by Wes and her, that are meant to be so invasive and offensive to the public that they would damage the reputation of The Every once they are released.

During this time, she receives increasingly distressed letters from her college professor, Meena Agarwal, an anti-monopolist who strongly opposes The Every and is upset that Delaney is working there.

On the way up, Delaney proposes her most radical idea yet, which involves rolling all of the metrics that The Every is currently privately gathering about people into a single, public score that evaluates a person's total value.

[6] A November 2021 review in The Guardian called Eggers "a wonderful storyteller with an alert and defiant vision", and, comparing the book to The Circle, described it as "longer and baggier, but still fuelled by rage at the power of Silicon Valley and its numbing effect on the human race".

[7] The New York Times described the book as "[moving] relentlessly from one mocking sendup of tech culture to the next" but also stated "for a defense of nuance and unpredictability, 'The Every' exhibits a startling lack of both" and complains "Very little is left to interpretation...I wished, often, to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, exercise my own subjectivity — that same endangered faculty the novel mourns...For a long novel, the story is strikingly static, its message so unchanging that a plot never really develops.