How to find a website you visited weeks ago

You remember the page. You remember roughly when, maybe a picture on it, maybe a phrase. What you don’t remember is the address. Browsers keep more than most people think — here is how to get it back.

In Safari

1. Choose History › Show All History, or press ⌘Y.
2. Type in the search field at the top right: a word from the page’s title or address — the site’s name, the product, the topic.
3. Can’t think of a word? Scroll the list instead: it is grouped by day, so “last Tuesday afternoon” is often enough.

Apple says Safari remembers the websites you visited for as long as a year. If you turned on Safari in iCloud on your iPhone or iPad, the pages you visited there appear too.

In Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc

1. Press ⌘Y to open History.
2. Use the search field at the top.

Google says Chrome’s History lists the pages you visited in the last 90 days. If you are signed in and sync history, pages from your other devices appear as well. Other Chromium browsers work the same way, though their retention may differ.

Search tips that work

• Search for the site, not the sentence. History matches titles and addresses: “bbc”, “ikea”, “github” narrow things fast.
• Try the topic word the title would use. Recipe titles contain the dish; product pages contain the product name.
• Look around the moment. Found something from the same session? The page you want is often just before or after it in the list.
• Check other browsers. If you use more than one, the page may be in the other one’s history.
• Check your bookmarks and Reading List, and in Safari, your open Tab Groups.

When history can’t help

History only knows titles and addresses. If the page’s title was generic (“Home”, “Product”, “Untitled”), or what you remember is something the page said, browser history won’t find it. It also forgets: after a year in Safari, 90 days in Chrome, or whenever someone clears it.

What you would need is a memory of what was on your screen. That is what a screen memory does: it keeps a light, compressed memory of what you saw and reads its text, so you can search for the phrase you remember and land on the page, the word highlighted.

DejaVu does that on your Mac, across every app — browsers, PDFs, chats, email. Nothing leaves your Mac, it never keeps what you type, and your memory opens with Touch ID. It can’t find pages you saw before installing it, but from then on, “I read it somewhere last week” takes a few seconds.

For more ways to find something you saw, see How to find something you saw on your Mac.