Where is the Reading List in Safari on a Mac?

Click the Sidebar button in Safari's toolbar, then click Reading List. To add the page you are on, press Shift-Command-D, use Share and then Add to Reading List, or Shift-click a link to add the page it points to.

Where is the Reading List in Safari on iPhone?

Tap the Bookmarks button, the open book, then the Reading List tab, the glasses. If your tab bar is in the compact layout that iOS 26 introduced, Bookmarks sits behind the More button. To add a page, tap Share, then Add to Reading List.

Does Safari Reading List work offline?

Yes, if you ask it to. On a Mac, Safari Settings, Advanced, then Save articles for offline reading automatically. On iPhone, Settings, Apps, Safari, then Automatically Save Offline under Reading List. It is a setting on each device, so turn it on everywhere you read.

Can I export my Safari Reading List?

Not with a button made for it. File, Export, Bookmarks is built for bookmarks, and recent reports say the Reading List is left out. The items live in a file called Bookmarks.plist in your Safari folder, and a copy of that file converts to readable text with one Terminal command.

Why did my Safari Reading List disappear?

Most often Safari was switched off in iCloud on one device, or the device is signed in to a different Apple Account. The list syncs through iCloud, so a change on one device is mirrored on the rest, including Clear All Items, which cannot be undone.

Safari Reading List: Where It Lives, and What It Loses

Safari has a reading list. It is Apple’s built-in place for pages you mean to come back to, separate from your bookmarks, and it has been in Safari on the Mac and iPhone since 2011. On a Mac it lives in the sidebar. On iPhone it is a tab behind the Bookmarks button, the one with the glasses.

It is also better than most people think, and worse in one place that matters. Safari will keep a full offline copy of every page you add, which Chrome’s version does not do on a computer. The Mac list has a search field. But there is no export button, the offline copy stays on the device that saved it, and when the list empties on one device it empties on all of them.

This covers where to find it on each device, how to make it save pages offline, why it disappears, and how to get every item out when Safari gives you no button for it.

Quick answer

On a Mac, it is in the sidebar. Click the Sidebar button in the toolbar, then Reading List. Shift-Command-D adds the page you are on.
On iPhone and iPad, it is behind Bookmarks. Tap the Bookmarks button (the open book), then the glasses tab. In the compact tab bar, Bookmarks is under the More button.
It saves the page only if you tell it to. Turn on automatic offline saving on each device. Without it, an item is a link, a title and a short preview.
There is no export button. The list lives in a file called Bookmarks.plist, and one Terminal command turns a copy of it into text you can read. Steps below.
It holds nothing from X, Reddit or LinkedIn. Safari is not a browser ContextBolt runs in. If you also use Chrome, ContextBolt keeps those saves and the pages you save, in one searchable library.

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Search your saves

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Example data

Where the Reading List is on a Mac

Apple’s Safari guide for the Mac gives the click paths, and they have barely changed in years.

To open it: click the Sidebar button in the toolbar, then click Reading List. Click the Sidebar button again to hide it. Control-Command-2 opens the Reading List sidebar from the keyboard.
To add the page you are on: press Shift-Command-D. Or click Share in the toolbar and choose Add to Reading List. Or hover over the address field and click the small Add button at its left end.
To add a page without opening it: Shift-click any link. Safari adds the linked page and leaves you where you are.
To find something: type in the search field above the list. You may need to scroll up to see it.
To hide what you have read: click Unread above the list. Click All to bring everything back.

Control-click any item for the rest: Save Offline, Mark as Read or Mark as Unread, Delete, and Clear All Items, which empties the whole list.

The Add button went missing in 2024

If you remember a plus sign in the address field and cannot find it, you are not imagining it. After Safari 18 arrived with macOS Sequoia, people in an Apple Community thread reported the button gone. It now appears only when the pointer is over the left end of the field, and some reported it back in Safari 18.1. Shift-Command-D works either way.

Where it is on iPhone and iPad

On iPhone, the list sits inside Bookmarks rather than in a sidebar.

To open it: tap the Bookmarks button, the open book, then tap the tab with the glasses icon. If you switched to the compact tab bar that iOS 26 introduced, the Bookmarks button is under the More button (three dots).
To add a page: tap Share, then Add to Reading List. You can also touch and hold the Bookmarks button and choose Add to Reading List.
To mark an item read or unread: swipe right on it.
To delete an item: swipe left on it.
To hide what you have read: tap Show Unread at the bottom of the list.

There is no Clear All on iPhone. Emptying the whole list in one go is a Mac-only action. On iPhone you delete items one at a time, or use Edit to select several.

What each item actually keeps

This is where Safari is genuinely better than Chrome. Chrome’s reading list keeps a URL, a title, a read flag and two timestamps on a computer, and nothing of the page. Safari can keep the page itself.

By default, an item is a link with a preview. Safari stores the URL, the title, a short preview of the text (the summary you see under each title in the sidebar) and the date you added it. If the page changes or disappears, that preview is all you have. That is link rot, and a read-later list is where it bites hardest, because everything on it is something you have not read yet.

Turn on offline saving and it keeps the page. Safari then downloads a copy of each page you add.

Mac: Safari, then Settings, then Advanced, then tick “Save articles for offline reading automatically”. To save just one item, Control-click it in the sidebar and choose Save Offline.
iPhone and iPad: Settings, then Apps, then Safari, then turn on Automatically Save Offline, under Reading List.

Two catches. It is a setting on each device, so turning it on for your iPhone does nothing on your Mac. And the offline copy lives on the device that downloaded it. The list syncs through iCloud; whether a given device has the page saved depends on that device’s setting.

What it does not have

No folders. No tags. No notes. Every item goes into one column, sorted by when you added it, with Unread as the one filter. At thirty items that is fine. At four hundred, you are typing into the search field and hoping the words you remember were in the title or the preview.

Why the Reading List disappears

When a Safari Reading List goes empty, it is almost never a corrupted file. It is iCloud doing exactly what it was asked.

What you see	Likely cause	What to do
Empty on one device, full on another	Safari is switched off in iCloud on the empty one	Turn Safari on in iCloud settings on that device and wait for it to sync
A different list on a new device	Signed in to a different Apple Account	Check the name at the top of Settings, or System Settings on a Mac
Empty everywhere at once	Clear All Items on a Mac, synced to every device	Restore Bookmarks.plist from a Time Machine backup
Items there, pages will not load offline	Offline saving was off on this device	Turn it on; it applies to pages from now on

The third row is the one that hurts. Clear All Items asks you to confirm, and then it is done. Because the list syncs through iCloud, every device signed in to the same account empties with it.

Apple’s iCloud recovery page will not obviously help either. Its Restore Bookmarks page covers Safari bookmarks and does not mention the Reading List anywhere. Try it, since it costs nothing and your current set is archived before a restore, but do not count on it. A Mac backup is the dependable route, because the Reading List is stored inside the same Bookmarks.plist file as your bookmarks.

If your bookmarks vanished along with the list, the causes overlap. Our guide to missing Safari bookmarks walks through profiles, iCloud and the Advanced Data Protection catch.

BlogWhy Did My Safari Bookmarks Disappear? Get Them BackThe same iCloud mechanics, one list over. Check the sidebar and your profile first, then the recovery page.

How to get your Reading List out

Safari has no Export Reading List button, on any device. File, then Export, then Bookmarks writes your bookmarks to an HTML file, and a site that tested it recently reports that the Reading List is left out. Whether it comes along has varied over the years, so the quick check is to export, open the file, and search it for the title of something on your list. If it is not there, use one of these.

Route 1: one item at a time

Open each item and bookmark it with Command-D, choosing a folder. Fine for ten items. It loses the date you added each one and whether you had read it.

Route 2: read the file Safari keeps

On a Mac, every Reading List item is stored in Bookmarks.plist, in the Safari folder of your user Library, inside a folder named com.apple.ReadingList. The file is binary, so it looks like noise if you open it. One built-in command converts it. People have used this route since an Apple Community thread from 2011.

Quit Safari, so the file is not being written while you copy it.
In Finder, choose Go, then Go to Folder, type ~/Library/Safari and press Return.
Copy Bookmarks.plist to your Desktop. Work on the copy, never the original. Copying in Finder also avoids the permission error Terminal gives when it reads the Safari folder directly.
Open Terminal and run this, which writes a readable copy called reading-list.xml:

plutil -convert xml1 -o ~/Desktop/reading-list.xml ~/Desktop/Bookmarks.plist

Open reading-list.xml in TextEdit and search for com.apple.ReadingList. Everything after it is your list. Each item’s address follows a URLString key, its title follows a title key, and the date you added it is in a DateAdded field.

That is a full list of everything you saved, with dates, which is more than Chrome’s reading list will ever give you without an extension. It is not a file another browser imports, though. To move the items into Chrome, paste the addresses in, or let a converter turn the plist into a bookmarks HTML file. If you use one, pick one that says it reads the file in your browser rather than uploading it.

On iPhone only

There is no route from the phone itself. If you have a Mac signed in to the same Apple Account with Safari turned on in iCloud, the list syncs there, and Route 2 works on the Mac. Without a Mac, Route 1 is what you have.

When the Reading List is the wrong tool

The Reading List is good at one job. A page deserves twenty minutes you do not have right now, and you want it out of your tabs and into a queue. Shift-Command-D, or Share and Add to Reading List, and keep going. With offline saving on, it will even be there on the train.

It is the wrong place for things you have decided are worth keeping. Everything above says why. One column with no folders. No export button. An offline copy that lives on one device. A single Clear All that empties every device at once. And nothing from X, Reddit or LinkedIn, because saves made inside those apps never reach Safari at all.

ContextBolt is built for the keeping job, and it is ours, so weigh the bias. It does not run in Safari. It is a Chrome extension, so this only helps if you also browse in Chrome. There, it keeps the pages you save with their text, alongside your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves, and search runs on your device. Basic is free up to 150 bookmarks.

BlogWhere Is My Chrome Reading List? Open It, Pin It, Export ItChrome’s version keeps only the link on a computer and has no export, so the fix there is a three-file extension.

The honest take

If you came here to find the list, it is the Sidebar button and Reading List on a Mac, and Bookmarks and the glasses on iPhone. Turn on offline saving on every device while you are there, because it is off by default and it is the best thing the feature does.

Apple built a better reading list than Google did. It keeps the page, it has search on the Mac, and its data is in a file you can actually open. What it never built is a way out. A list you have fed for five years cannot be exported from any menu, and one click on the wrong item empties it on every device you own.

So use it as a queue. Empty it as you read. And if the list has quietly become an archive, run Route 2 today, while there is still something in it to copy.