Google Chrome will write every bookmark you own into a single HTML file. On a computer it takes three clicks, and the file opens in Firefox, Safari, Edge and almost anything else that takes bookmarks.
The part most guides skip is what goes into that file. Chrome now keeps two sets of bookmarks, the ones in your Google Account and the ones only on this computer. The export quietly merges them. It also folds your phone’s bookmarks in, if they synced.
So here are the three clicks, then the phone, then what the file holds. After that, how to get it into a spreadsheet, another browser, or somewhere that keeps more than a link.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+O (Cmd+Option+B on a Mac), click the three dots at the top right of the Bookmark Manager, choose Export bookmarks. Chrome writes one HTML file, in your Documents folder unless you pick another.
- Phones cannot export. Save the phone’s bookmarks to your Google Account (Settings, your name, Save in account), then export on a computer, or download them with Google Takeout.
- The file merges your account and device bookmarks with nothing to say which was which. You get the title, address, folder and date added. Not the page itself.
- No Chrome export holds the saving you do outside Chrome’s star. ContextBolt is a Chrome extension that saves any page with its text in one click and captures your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves as you make them. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks.
- Need a spreadsheet? Chrome only exports HTML. A short script below turns it into a CSV.
How do I export bookmarks from Chrome?
You need Chrome on a computer for this. Windows, Mac, Linux or a Chromebook all work the same way.
- Open the Bookmark Manager. Press
Ctrl+Shift+Oon Windows, orCmd+Option+Bon a Mac. Typingchrome://bookmarksin the address bar does the same thing. So does the three-dot menu, then Bookmarks and lists, then Bookmark Manager. - Click the three dots inside the Bookmark Manager. They sit at the right end of the bar across the top of the page. These are not the three dots in Chrome’s toolbar, and that mix-up is where most people stall. Older versions, and Google’s Chromebook instructions, label this menu Organize.
- Choose Export bookmarks. A normal Save dialog opens.
That is the whole procedure, and it matches Google’s own export steps. There is no options screen. You cannot export a single folder, and you cannot pick a format. Every bookmark in the profile goes into one HTML file.
Where the file lands
Chrome fills in two things for you. The folder is your Documents folder, not Downloads, which surprises people who go looking for it later. The name is the word bookmarks plus today’s date, with the slashes turned into underscores. In the US on October 9, 2026, that reads like this.
Default filename
bookmarks_10_9_26.htmlRename it before you click Save. chrome-work-laptop-2026-10-09.html tells you which machine and which profile it came from a year from now. bookmarks_10_9_26.html tells you nothing.
One profile at a time: The export covers the Chrome profile you are in, and nothing else. If you run a personal and a work profile, each one needs its own export. When a file looks short, a different profile is the usual reason, so check the picture at the top right of Chrome before you assume anything is lost.
Can you export Chrome bookmarks from your phone?
No. Chrome on Android and Chrome on iPhone have no export option, and Google’s export instructions cover computers and Chromebooks only. There are two ways around it.
Route one, sync then export: Sign in to Chrome on the phone with your Google Account. That alone only covers what you save from now on, because Google’s help says that when you are signed in and save new info like a bookmark, it’s saved in your Google Account. For the bookmarks already on the phone, open Chrome’s Settings, tap your name, tap Save in account, pick bookmarks, and confirm. Then sign in to Chrome on any computer with the same account, wait for the bookmarks to appear, and run the three clicks above. The phone’s bookmarks come out in the same file. If they still never show up on the computer, our guide to Chrome bookmarks not syncing walks the fixes in order.
Route two, Google Takeout: Google’s Chrome data export covers personal information stored in your Google Account, and bookmarks are on its list, alongside history, autofill and extensions. You request it at takeout.google.com, deselect everything except Chrome, and Google emails a download link. Two catches. It only holds what reached your Google Account, so device-only bookmarks are not in it. And Google’s own Takeout help says changes made between the request and the archive being built may be missing, and recommends opening the files on a computer anyway.
Route one is faster and gives you the normal file. Takeout is the fallback when you have no computer you can sign in to.
What is actually inside the file
Open the file in Notepad or TextEdit instead of a browser, and you can read exactly what Chrome gave you. It is the Netscape bookmark format, a 1990s format that every major browser still reads and writes. Chrome’s writer is open source, and the code that builds the file answers every question about it.
What Chrome writes, trimmed
<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DL><p>
<DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1728432000" LAST_MODIFIED="1760000000"
PERSONAL_TOOLBAR_FOLDER="true">Bookmarks bar</H3>
<DL><p>
<DT><A HREF="https://example.com/pricing"
ADD_DATE="1759968000">Pricing</A>
</DL><p>
<DT><A HREF="https://example.com/docs"
ADD_DATE="1756252800">API docs</A>
</DL><p>Every bookmark is one A line. It carries the address, the title, the date you added it, and the site’s icon as embedded base64 when Chrome has one cached. That is all. Each folder is an H3 with the date it was created and last changed. The real file puts each tag on one line. It is wrapped here so it fits.
Three things in there are worth knowing before you rely on it.
Account and device, merged
Since Chrome started saving new bookmarks to your Google Account, a signed-in Chrome can hold two separate sets, one in the account and one only on the computer. Google’s help even offers a Save items in Account button for moving the old ones across. The export does not care. Chrome’s code writes the device bookmark bar, then the account bookmark bar, into the same folder, and does the same for the rest.
Nothing in the file records which set a bookmark came from. If you saved a link in both, it appears twice.
Other and Mobile folders disappear
In Chrome, anything not on the bookmarks bar sits in Other bookmarks, and your phone’s bookmarks sit in Mobile bookmarks. Neither folder exists in the export. Chrome’s code shifts their contents up a level “for compatibility” with other browsers, so they land loose at the top of the file, beside the Bookmarks bar folder. Your own folders inside them survive. The two parent folders do not.
So a phone bookmark and a desktop bookmark can end up next to each other with no label to tell them apart. If that split matters to you, write it down before you leave Chrome.
What Chrome knows and leaves out
Chrome’s live bookmarks file records when you last opened each bookmark, in a field called date_last_used. The export drops it. The file has the day you saved a link and nothing about whether you ever went back.
That is the field that would tell you which of your 900 bookmarks still matter. It exists. Chrome just does not hand it over.
Where the file can go next
Every major browser reads this format, which is why it has outlived the browser that invented it. Here is where people actually take it.
Another browser: Firefox, Safari and Edge all import a bookmarks HTML file from their own import screens, and Apple’s Safari guide names Chrome’s export as a file it accepts. The click paths for each, and the duplicates you get when you import twice, are in our guide to moving bookmarks between browsers. If you are moving to Microsoft’s browser, the Edge favorites guide covers its import route too.
Back into Chrome: On a new computer or a fresh profile, open the three-dot menu, then Bookmarks and lists, then Import bookmarks and settings, and choose the file. On a profile whose bookmarks bar already has anything on it, Chrome puts the whole import into a new folder on the bar rather than merging it into yours.
A bookmark manager: When one offers an import, this file is usually what it asks for, so keep it handy when you try one.
A spreadsheet: This is the one Chrome does not help with. It exports HTML only, and a spreadsheet cannot read that nested list as rows and columns. The script below fixes that.
Turn the export into a CSV
Save this as bookmarks_to_csv.py in the same folder as your export. It uses only Python’s standard library, so there is nothing to install.
bookmarks_to_csv.py
import csv, sys
from datetime import datetime, timezone
from html.parser import HTMLParser
class Marks(HTMLParser):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.stack, self.rows = [], []
self.tag, self.text = None, ""
self.href, self.added, self.folder = None, None, None
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
a = dict(attrs)
if tag == "dl":
self.stack.append(self.folder)
self.folder = None
elif tag in ("a", "h3"):
self.tag, self.text = tag, ""
self.href, self.added = a.get("href"), a.get("add_date")
def handle_data(self, data):
if self.tag:
self.text += data
def handle_endtag(self, tag):
if tag == "dl" and self.stack:
self.stack.pop()
elif tag == "h3":
self.folder, self.tag = self.text.strip(), None
elif tag == "a":
ts = int(self.added or 0)
day = datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, timezone.utc).date()
path = " / ".join(f for f in self.stack if f)
self.rows.append([self.text.strip(), self.href, path, day])
self.tag = None
p = Marks()
p.feed(open(sys.argv[1], encoding="utf-8").read())
with open("bookmarks.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8-sig") as f:
w = csv.writer(f)
w.writerow(["title", "url", "folder", "added"])
w.writerows(p.rows)
print(len(p.rows), "bookmarks written to bookmarks.csv")Then run it with your export’s filename. On a Mac or Linux, use python3 instead of python.
Run it
python bookmarks_to_csv.py bookmarks_10_9_26.htmlYou get bookmarks.csv with one row per bookmark. The four columns are the title, the address, the folder path such as Bookmarks bar / Work / Clients, and the date you added it. We ran it against an export built from a real Chrome profile, nested folders, ampersands and quote marks included, and every row came through. Sort by the date column and you can see at a glance how much of the list is from 2019.
The live file, when there is no export button
The export is a snapshot you asked for. Chrome also keeps the live file it writes to every time you add a bookmark, and copying it is a backup that needs no menu at all. It is also the way in when Chrome will not open.
Windows
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\BookmarksMac
~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/BookmarksThe file is called Bookmarks, with no extension, and it is plain JSON you can open in any text editor. Other profiles live in folders named Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on, beside Default.
Three neighbors are worth recognizing.
Bookmarks.bak: the previous version. It is the first thing to reach for after an accidental delete.AccountBookmarks: where Chrome keeps the bookmarks saved to your Google Account, separate from the device ones. Copy both if you use both.EncryptedBookmarks2: on a current Chrome install you may also see this one. It is an encrypted copy that will not open in a text editor. The plain files are still written beside it, and they are the ones to copy.
Close Chrome before you copy anything. A running browser rewrites these files, and a copy taken mid-write can come back broken. And if you want the export without opening Chrome at all, our free Chrome bookmark restore tool reads a Bookmarks or Bookmarks.bak file in your browser and hands back an importable HTML file. If you are here because bookmarks already vanished, the deleted bookmarks recovery guide is the faster route.
What no Chrome export holds
The export is a good backup of one thing, your list of links. It is worth being clear about what that leaves out.
The pages: A bookmark is an address. If the site moves, shuts down or puts the article behind a login, the bookmark still exports perfectly and points at nothing. We wrote up how fast old links rot separately. Every year you keep a bookmarks file, more of it stops working.
Everything you saved somewhere else: A Chrome export holds what you starred in Chrome. It holds nothing you saved on X, nothing from your Reddit saved list, nothing from LinkedIn. For a lot of people that is most of what they save, and none of it is anywhere near your bookmarks bar.
That second gap is what ContextBolt was built for. It is a Chrome extension. One click saves any web page with its article text, so the entry still reads after the link dies, and saved pages open in ContextBolt Reader, a clean reading view. Your X saves are captured as you make them, your Reddit saved list syncs in within minutes, and on LinkedIn ContextBolt adds its own save button to posts and imports the Saved Items file from LinkedIn’s data export. Every post and page you capture lands in one library, AI-tagged and grouped into topics, with search that runs instantly on your device.
It works from your next save rather than reading this file. So here is the five-minute version. Open the export, find the dozen links you still go back to, and save each one with ContextBolt in a click. Their text is then kept even if the page later disappears, and the rest of the file can go back to being a backup. Basic is free and capped at 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month, removes the cap, adds cloud sync, and exports the whole library to CSV, JSON or Excel with the saved text in its own column, which is the spreadsheet Chrome will not give you.
The honest take
Export your Chrome bookmarks. Three clicks, no cost, and the day a profile breaks you will want the file. Rename it, and put it somewhere that is not the same laptop.
But know what you are holding. It is a flattened list that merges two sets Chrome keeps apart, drops the Mobile and Other folders, and leaves behind the one field that says which bookmarks you ever opened again. It is built for leaving Chrome, not for remembering what you found.
Most of us bookmark things to come back to them, and the export is silent on whether we ever did. If the honest answer is “rarely”, the fix is not a better backup of the list. It is saving the next good thing somewhere that keeps the words, not just the address. ContextBolt does that, and Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks.