How to Group Chrome Tabs by Website Automatically

Updated June 2026 · 5 min read

Chrome added native tab groups in early 2020, but they're entirely manual — you create a group, name it, drag tabs into it, repeat. If your goal is "every tab from github.com ends up in one group, every tab from stackoverflow.com in another, automatically," there are three working approaches. This guide walks through each.

Method 1: Manual grouping (good for ~5 groups)

The native Chrome workflow:

1. Right-click a tab and choose Add tab to new group.
2. Type a name (e.g. github.com) and pick a color.
3. Drag every other matching tab onto the group label, or right-click them and choose Add tab to group → [name].
4. Click the group label to collapse the group. Click again to expand.

Pros: No install. Full control over group names and colors.
Cons: Pure manual labor. With 80 tabs across 12 hostnames you're looking at ~5 minutes of dragging — and you have to redo it every time you open a new batch of tabs.

Method 2: Drag-and-drop into existing groups

If you've already created groups in past sessions, you can drag new tabs into them. This works well for a long-lived window where you keep the same groups around for weeks. It does not help when you've just opened a fresh chaos of tabs — you still have to create the groups first.

Method 3: Auto-group by hostname with an extension

This is the only approach that scales. The right extension reads every tab's URL, extracts the hostname, and creates one tab group per hostname — automatically.

Tab Vacuum does this in one click. When you click its toolbar icon:

1. It first removes every duplicate tab across all your open Chrome windows (matched by URL).
2. It merges the survivors into the window where you clicked.
3. It groups the remaining tabs by hostname — every github.com tab in one group, every stackoverflow.com tab in another, etc.
4. Each group is collapsed by default, so the tab bar stays clean.

The grouping logic is intentionally minimal: extract new URL(tab.url).hostname, group tabs that share it, label the group with the hostname, collapse. No machine learning, no settings panel — just deterministic, predictable behavior.

How the three methods compare

FAQ

Can Chrome auto-group tabs by domain natively?

No. Chrome's tab groups feature is entirely manual as of mid-2026. There's an experimental chrome://flags entry called "Tab Groups Save" but it persists groups, not creates them automatically.

What happens to tabs that are already in a group?

Tab Vacuum doesn't touch tabs that are already manually grouped — it only auto-groups tabs that aren't part of an existing group. This means you can keep your custom groups (e.g. "Work in progress") intact.

Will it group tabs from different subdomains together?

No. Tab Vacuum groups by exact hostname. blog.example.com and shop.example.com end up in separate groups. This is intentional — most users find subdomain-specific groups more useful than rolled-up second-level domains.