Map a site

A site map captures the pages of one site and lays them out side by side, the start page first and a column for each step away from it, with a line for every link between them. Use it to review a site's structure, hand over a set of screens, or keep how a small site looked on a day. It is a preview: the popup marks it with a green dot until you first use it.

1. Open the page to start from, usually the home page, and click the Page Scanner icon.
2. Press Map this site, under Pick an element. The map opens in a tab of its own. Nothing has been read yet.
3. Choose how far to go. 2 links deep takes the start page, the pages it links to and the pages those link to; 3 links deep goes one step further.
4. Press Find pages. Chrome asks you to let Page Scanner read the site, for example every page under example.com. Allow it. Page Scanner then reads the site's pages to list them, which takes a few seconds. Each page appears below as it is read.
5. Read the list. It shows the pages it will capture, in order, and the ones it leaves out and why. Pages of one kind, such as blog posts, are one row that says how many others are like it, and only that one is captured.
6. Press Capture N pages. Each page opens in a background tab, is captured the way a scan is, and closes again. The map grows as each one is done. Cancel stops it, and closing the map's tab does too; what was captured stays.

Reading the map

Each page has its address at the top, colored by how it stands to the start page:

• Same host (green, a house): the start page's own host, such as www.example.com.
• Another subdomain (blue, layers): another host of the same site, such as docs.example.com.
• Another site (grey, an arrow out of a box): a link that leaves the site. It is drawn as its address only, never opened or captured.

A page opens on its first screen. The buttons at its top fold it to its address alone or unfold it to the whole page, and the toolbar above the map does the same for every page. A page that answered with an error, such as 404, says so in red beside its address; one that could not be captured says why. The Pages panel on the right lists the pages by how many links they are from the start page, one section per column of the map, and takes you to any page. The rail beside it works as the editor's: its buttons switch between Format and Pages, ⌘/Ctrl + B folds the panel away, and the gear at its foot opens the settings. The editor's keys for zooming, extracting and the panels work here too (Shortcuts).

Open in editor on a page, or a double-click, opens its capture in the editor, where it crops and exports like any scan.

Save the map, or paste it into Figma

Choose what to make in the Format panel, then press Extract at the right of the toolbar above the map (or ⌘/Ctrl + P):

• PNG saves the whole map as one picture, named after the site (example.com-map.png).
• SVG saves it as a drawing (example.com-map.svg). The cards, addresses and links stay sharp however far you zoom in, and the addresses are text you can search and edit.
• Figma copies the same drawing to the clipboard. In a Figma file, paste it with ⌘V (Ctrl+V on Windows): each page comes in as a layer named by its address, with its text in Inter.

Each page is in it as it is folded on the screen, so fold the pages first to make the map as long or as short as you want: addresses only, first screens, or whole pages. Pages off screen are in it too. The pages' pictures are small in every format, enough to recognize each one; to read a page, export it from the editor.

What it reads, and what it leaves alone

• It stays in the site you started from. example.com, www.example.com and docs.example.com are one site; a.github.io and b.github.io are two.
• It never follows a link that would do something: an address that says sign out, log out, delete, unsubscribe or cancel. The pages open in your own browser, signed in as you are, so this matters.
• It opens no files (PDFs, images, feeds, archives), follows no link marked nofollow, and keeps to what each host's robots.txt allows, except for the page you started from.
• It slows down when a site asks it to. Pages are captured a second apart. A site that answers "too many requests" is left alone for a while and asked again.
• A check that you are a person is yours to pass. When a site shows one ("Just a moment…", "Performing security verification"), the map stops, brings that tab to the front and waits. Pass the check there, and the map captures the page, comes back and goes on by itself. Show tab brings the check back if you moved away, and Skip page leaves that page off the map. After 5 minutes without it the page is left off, and the check screen is never put on the map as the page.
• Up to 30 pages are captured, one per kind of page. A larger site lists the rest as "Past 30 pages".
• Nothing leaves your computer. The pages are read and captured by your browser, and the map is kept with your captures for 12 hours.

While the pages are captured, Chrome shows its debugging bar, as it does for every scan, until the last page is done. See the bar during a scan.

Limits

• The list is read from each page as it is first served. A link a page adds with JavaScript after it loads is not followed, though the map still counts it on that page.
• Three links deep and 30 pages at most.
• The map saves as a PNG or an SVG, or goes to Figma through the clipboard, always drawn from small pictures of each page; a page's full capture exports from the editor. An SVG of many whole pages can be a few MB, since the pictures are inside it.
• Chrome keeps the access you gave to the site until you remove it on Page Scanner's details page (chrome://extensions, Details, Site access).
• One map is made at a time.