How to search your Chrome history

You read something last week and now you need it again. You remember roughly what it said and nothing about where it was. Chrome kept a record, and there are three ways to search it, depending on how much you remember.

Open the History page and search

Press Ctrl+H (Cmd+Y on a Mac), or open the three-dot menu, then History, then History. The page lists what you visited, newest first, with a search bar across the top.

Type a word from the page’s title or part of its address and the list narrows as you go. This plain search looks at titles and addresses only. It does not read the text of the pages themselves, so search for what the tab would have said, not for a sentence you remember from the middle of the article.

A tip that saves a lot of scrolling. If you remember the site but not the page, type the site’s name. Twenty visits to one domain are much easier to scan than a week of everything.

Search from the address bar

You don’t have to open the History page first. Click the address bar, type @history, and press Tab or Space. The bar switches to searching your history, and whatever you type next is matched against it. Pick a result from the list and Chrome opens it.

It’s the same search as the History page, a few keystrokes closer.

Find a page by date

The History page has two views, By date and By group. By date is the plain timeline, with a heading for each day. Chrome has no date picker, so finding last Tuesday means scrolling down to it. It goes faster if you search for the site first and then look for the day.

By group is the more useful one when you were researching something. Chrome bundles related pages and searches together, so the six tabs you opened while comparing laptops sit in one group. The menu next to a group can open all of them at once in a new tab group.

Search by what the page said

Chrome has a newer option for when the title is no help. It’s called History search, powered by AI, and it lets you describe the page in everyday language. Google’s help page says it matches against the content of pages you visited, not only their titles.

A few conditions apply, all from that same help page.

• You need to be in the US with Chrome set to English.
• You turn it on yourself, under Settings, then AI Innovations.
• It only knows pages you visited after you turned it on.
• A search needs two or more words. The best matches, up to three, show in their own section, and you can narrow them to yesterday, the last 7 days or the last 30.

Chrome says the page contents it saves for this are stored on your device and encrypted. If you’re outside the US, or you would rather not have page contents saved at all, the title and address search above is what you have.

What your history leaves out

A search that comes back empty usually has one of four causes. The page is older than 90 days, which is as far back as the History page goes. You were in Incognito, where nothing is recorded. You deleted the entry at some point. Or it was one of Chrome’s own pages, like chrome://settings, which never show up.

If you’re signed in and syncing history, the page also shows what you visited on your other devices. So the thing you read on your phone on the train may be in the list on your laptop.

Older than 90 days

There is one more place to look, if you set it up beforehand. Google’s Web & App Activity can keep your Chrome history in your Google Account. It has a checkbox called “Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services”, and it only saves Chrome history while you’re signed in to Chrome and syncing history.

If that was on, your older activity is at myactivity.google.com. If it wasn’t, a page from four months ago is not recoverable from Chrome. That is worth knowing before you spend an hour looking.

For anything you’ll want again in a year, history is the wrong place to keep it. Bookmark it, or save the window it was in.

Delete something from history

On the History page, tick the box next to each entry, then click Delete at the top right and confirm. To wipe a stretch of time, open Chrome’s three-dot menu, choose Delete browsing data, pick a time range, tick Browsing history, and delete.

Searching history from any page

Opening the History page means leaving what you were doing. We built a shorter route into UtilEngine, our launcher extension for Chrome. Press your shortcut on any page, type “h” and a space, then a word or two. Matches come back with the site, how many times you visited, and how long ago. Enter opens one in a new tab and Shift+Enter opens it in the tab you’re on. Cmd+Enter (Ctrl on Windows) ticks several so you can open them together.

The same bar reaches further than history. Type “t” for the tabs you have open, which is where a “lost” page often turns out to be, or “s” for windows you saved as sessions. We covered the tab side in the tab switcher.

Know its limits before you pay for it. UtilEngine searches the history Chrome already keeps, by title and address, so the 90 days apply here too and it does not read page text. It costs $49 once. If the History page and @history cover you, they’re free and already installed.

If the tab was only just closed

History is the slow way to get back a tab you closed a minute ago. Ctrl+Shift+T reopens it directly. The full list of options is in how to open closed tabs in Chrome.

Common questions

What is the shortcut for Chrome history?

Ctrl+H on Windows and Linux, and Cmd+Y on a Mac. From the address bar, @history followed by Tab searches it without opening the page.

How far back does Chrome history go?

90 days on the History page. Older activity may be in your Google Account at myactivity.google.com, if Web & App Activity was set to include Chrome history.

Can I search Chrome history by date?

Not with a date picker. The By date view is a timeline you scroll, one heading per day. With History search, powered by AI switched on, you can narrow results to yesterday, the last 7 days or the last 30.

Can Chrome search the text of pages I visited?

Only with History search, powered by AI, which is limited to the US and to Chrome in English, and only covers pages visited after you turned it on. The regular search matches titles and addresses.

Why is a page missing from my history?

It was probably opened in Incognito, deleted, or visited more than 90 days ago. Pages on your other devices only show up if you’re signed in and syncing history.

Is Chrome history shared between my devices?

Only if you’re signed in to Chrome and syncing history. Then the History page on one device also lists pages you visited on the others.