How to Group Tabs by Website in Chrome

You've got six GitHub tabs, four Google Docs tabs, and a scatter of everything else, all mixed together on one strip in whatever order you happened to open them. It seems like the kind of thing a browser should just do for you — cluster tabs from the same site automatically. Chrome doesn't, and it's worth knowing exactly what does and doesn't exist before you go looking for a setting that isn't there.

There's no automatic option — check that first

Chrome's tab groups feature (colored labels that cluster tabs together in the strip) is entirely opt-in and manual. There's no toggle in chrome://settings, no built-in rule engine, and no background process that looks at a tab's URL and drops it into a matching group. Every group you see in your own tab strip got there because you — or an extension acting on your behalf — put it there by hand.

This trips people up because Chrome does have some automatic tab behavior elsewhere (Memory Saver discarding inactive tabs, for instance), so it's a reasonable assumption that grouping works the same way. It doesn't.

The manual way: select, then group

To cluster every tab from one site yourself:

1. Click the first tab from that site.
2. Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on Mac) every other tab from the same site to add them to the selection.
3. Right-click any of the highlighted tabs.
4. Choose Add tabs to new group (or Add tabs to group and pick an existing one).
5. Name the group and pick a color if prompted.

It works, and it looks tidy once it's done — but it's manual labor you repeat every session. Open five new tabs from the same site tomorrow and they land back on the strip ungrouped; Chrome doesn't remember "these came from the same domain, group them too." Our full tab groups guide covers naming, coloring, collapsing, and saving groups once you've made one.

The faster workaround: search instead of group

If the goal is really just "get to all my tabs from this one site quickly," grouping is more setup than the problem needs. Tab Search — the small downward-arrow icon at the top-right of the tab strip, or Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on Mac) — opens a searchable list of every open tab. Type part of a site's name or URL and the list filters down to just those tabs in about the same number of actions a manual group would take, without the group ever needing to exist. See Search Open Tabs in Chrome for the full rundown.

Why extensions vary here

Some third-party extensions use Chrome's tabGroups API to cluster tabs by hostname automatically as they open, which is the closest thing to the "just do it for me" behavior people expect. Coverage differs a lot between them, though — most only watch tabs in the current window and reset that tracking every time Chrome restarts, so a domain-grouping extension solves the "right now, in this window" version of the problem without solving the underlying one: tabs from the same site opened in different browsing sessions still don't know about each other.

Domain isn't always the right axis to group by

Grouping by website assumes the site is the unit of work, and for pure browsing — reading through a handful of the same news site's articles — that holds up fine. It breaks down the moment your actual task spans several sites: a bug fix might need a ticket (one domain), a pull request (a second), a design mock (a third), and a Slack thread (a fourth) open at once, and none of those four tabs share a hostname despite being the exact same piece of work. Grouping strictly by domain would scatter them across four different groups instead of keeping the task together. Organizing tabs by project covers the task-based alternative, which is what most people actually mean when "group by website" stops being enough.

Amazing Tabs sidesteps the domain-vs-project tradeoff entirely — you group tabs by whatever's actually useful to you, not by what a browser can infer from a URL:

• Save tabs into named spaces by project, client, or site — your call, not Chrome's.
• Find any tab instantly with ⌘K / Ctrl+K, by title or page content, no manual regrouping required session to session.
• Spaces persist independently of whether the browser or the original window is even open.
• Free for up to 100 saved links.

Group tabs your way, not just by domain. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup to install.

Quick recap

• Chrome has no automatic "group by domain" feature — every native tab group is created manually.
• The manual method: Ctrl/Cmd-click to select every tab from one site, then right-click → Add tabs to new group.
• Tab Search (Ctrl+Shift+A) filters to a site's tabs instantly without creating a group at all.
• Some extensions auto-group by hostname using Chrome's tabGroups API, but coverage is per-window and resets on restart.
• Domain is a useful axis for browsing, but project-based work usually spans multiple sites and needs a different grouping unit.

Further reading: How to Use Tab Groups in Chrome for the full native-groups walkthrough, Search Open Tabs in Chrome for the faster search-first approach, or How to Organize Chrome Tabs by Project for grouping by task instead of by site.

Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free → Install from the Chrome Web Store. 100 saved links free, upgrade only if you want unlimited and cross-device sync. See pricing for the full breakdown — including the $99 lifetime deal (capped at 200 spots).