A well-organized bookshelf in a library with neatly arranged books — what your browsing time looks like when it's actually legible.

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How to See Exactly Which Websites You Use Most on Mac

Most Mac tools will tell you how long you were in Chrome. None of them, by default, will tell you how long you spent on reddit.com. Here's how to close that gap — three methods, ranked by how much useful detail they actually give you.

Mike5 min read

How to See Exactly Which Websites You Use Most on Mac

If you're on a Mac and most of your work lives in the browser, the interesting question isn't "how long was Chrome open today?" It's "how much of that Chrome time was docs.google.com, how much was github.com, and how much was reddit?"

Every native time-tracking tool on macOS either refuses to answer that question or answers a worse version of it. This post walks through three ways to get to the real answer, from worst to best, so you can pick the one that fits.

Why this is harder than it should be

macOS, unlike a mobile OS, doesn't expose a public API for "current URL in the user's browser." For security reasons, browsers treat their tab content as private to the app. So the only ways to see what site you're on are:

  • Ask Safari directly, which Apple can do because it controls both sides.
  • Use macOS Automation (AppleScript) to ask Chrome, Arc, Brave, etc. to hand over the frontmost tab's URL.
  • Install a browser extension that logs URLs to disk or to a server.

Each method has wildly different levels of friction and polish. Here they are in increasing order of usefulness.

Method 1: Apple's Screen Time (don't bother if you use Chrome)

Screen Time, buried in System Settings, can break down time by website — but only for sites you visited in Safari. Every other browser is reported as a single undifferentiated blob.

To check it:

  1. System Settings → Screen Time → App Usage.
  2. Scroll to Safari, click through to see websites.
  3. Admire the pie chart. Close it. Forget about it.

The verdict: useful if Safari is genuinely your main browser. If you're like most knowledge workers in 2026 and live in Chrome, Arc, or Brave, Screen Time is silent on the actual question you're asking. We covered the full list of things Screen Time gets wrong in a separate post.

Method 2: Browser extensions (accurate, but only per browser)

A dedicated extension in your browser of choice can log URLs with precision, since it runs inside the browser and sees everything the browser sees.

The usual suspects:

  • Webtime Tracker (Chrome / Brave / Edge)
  • Chrome's built-in "Time spent" dashboard in Settings
  • History trend extensions for Firefox

These work fine within one browser. They fall apart the moment you use two browsers — a common setup where you have Arc for daily work and Safari for banking, or Chrome for work and Firefox for personal. Extensions don't aggregate across browsers, so you end up with three partial pictures.

The other catch: most of these extensions silently ship your history off to their servers. Read the permissions carefully. "Read and change all your data on websites you visit" means exactly what it sounds like. You're trading browser history to a third party for a bar chart.

Method 3: A native tracker that reads URLs via Automation

This is how the dedicated Mac trackers — Focus Meter, Timing, RescueTime Classic — pull this off. Instead of a browser extension, the app registers itself as a macOS Automation client. When you're in Chrome, it asks Chrome for the current URL. When you switch to Arc, it asks Arc. When you switch to Safari, it uses Apple's native hook.

You grant the permission once per browser, the first time. After that, every browser you use gets tracked uniformly. The picture you end up with is:

  • Per-site time: docs.google.com: 1h 42m, github.com: 58m, reddit.com: 12m.
  • Across browsers: time on gmail.com in Chrome + Arc is summed, not fragmented.
  • Categorizable: you can tag individual domains as productive, neutral, or distracting.
  • Trended over days: you can see that your reddit time has crept up from 5 min/day to 45 min/day over the last month.

The privacy trade-off exists, but it's narrow: the app needs Automation permission, and if it's a good app, that's the only permission it needs and nothing leaves your Mac. A bad app would send that data to a server. Check what the app does before granting the permission.

How to set up site-level tracking in Focus Meter

If you want Method 3 to work in about two minutes:

  1. Install Focus Meter from the Mac App Store.
  2. Open Settings → Privacy → turn on Browser URL Tracking.
  3. When macOS asks, grant Automation permission for each browser you use.
  4. Use your Mac normally for a day.
  5. Open Reports → Websites. There's your answer.

The same setting has two useful sub-options:

  • Record Root Domain Only — stores github.com instead of github.com/mikeqle/focus-meter/pull/42. Worth turning on if you're privacy-sensitive or you just don't want URLs cluttering your database.
  • Ignore Incognito / Private Browsing — exactly what it sounds like. Off by default on most trackers; on by default in Focus Meter.

What actually happens once you can see this

Three things, roughly in this order, in the first week of having this data.

Surprise at the top of the list. For knowledge workers, the top three websites are almost never what you'd guess. Most people assume their top site is Slack or Gmail. It's usually Google Docs, GitHub, or their CRM — which is fine. The surprise is how little time is on the one you thought dominated your day.

Shock at the distraction long tail. You expect Reddit or Twitter to be 10 minutes a day. It's 45. This is the conversation that actually moves behavior — not "am I productive?" but "wait, I spent how long on that?"

Better categorization decisions. Once you can see domains instead of apps, categorizing gets dramatically more accurate. Chrome isn't productive or unproductive — docs.google.com is productive, reddit.com is a distraction, stackoverflow.com is neutral. Without site-level detail, you're forced to make a call on the browser as a whole, which is always wrong.

The short version

  • Screen Time covers Safari only. If you use Chrome, Arc, Brave, or Firefox, it's useless for site-level data.
  • Browser extensions work inside one browser but fragment your picture and often ship your history to a server.
  • A native Mac tracker using the Automation permission reads URLs from every major browser, keeps the data local, and gives you per-site categorization and trends.

Whichever method you pick, the goal is the same: stop pretending "Chrome: 4 hours" is a useful number. It isn't.