Chrome Keeps Logging Me Out of Websites
Short answer
Check chrome://settings/content/cookies for Delete cookies and site data when you close all windows and turn it off, or add the sites you want remembered to Always allow. If that is already off, the cause is usually a blocked third-party cookie carrying the login, visible as a crossed-out eye icon in the address bar.
On this page
You sign in. You close Chrome. You open it an hour later and every site wants your password again.
Websites do not remember you by magic — they remember you with a cookie, and if that cookie is gone, you are a stranger. So the question is never “why has this site forgotten me”, it is “what is deleting the cookie”. There are four realistic answers, and they are easy to tell apart.
Which one is yours
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Logged out of everything after closing Chrome | Clear-on-exit is enabled | Cookie settings |
| Logged out of everything, randomly | An extension or a cleaner app | Extensions |
| One site, or sites that use a central login | Third-party cookies blocked | Allow that site |
| Only on this device, new laptop | Sessions do not sync, by design | Nothing to fix |
The first is far and away the most common, because people turn it on once for privacy and forget it exists.
Turn off clear-on-exit, or make exceptions
Open chrome://settings/content/cookies. Look for Delete cookies and site
data when you close all windows.
If it is on, that is your answer. The setting does exactly what it says — every session cookie on the machine is deleted the moment the last Chrome window closes, and “last window” includes the one you closed without noticing.
Two ways forward:
- Turn it off entirely if you set it years ago and no longer want it.
- Keep it on, with exceptions. On the same page, under Allowed to use
cookies (phrasing varies slightly between versions), add the sites you want
remembered. Use the
[*.]example.comform so subdomains are covered.
The exception list is the better answer for most people. You keep the clean-out for the thousand sites you visit once, and your mail, bank and work tools stay signed in.
While you are there, check chrome://settings/privacy for anything else scheduled. Chrome itself has no “clear every hour” feature, but if you have Enhanced Safe Browsing or a managed policy in place, the page will say so.
Check what your extensions are doing
Privacy and cleaner extensions delete cookies deliberately. That is their function, and they are usually configured more aggressively than people realise.
Open chrome://extensions and look for anything in these categories: cookie
auto-delete tools, “click to clean” utilities, privacy suites, VPN add-ons with
a tracking-protection module, and anything bundled by an antivirus vendor.
Most have a whitelist. Add the sites you want remembered rather than removing the extension, if you installed it on purpose.
Outside the browser, desktop cleanup utilities that offer to “free up space” by clearing browser data will take your cookies with them on every run. If you have one scheduled, that is a strong suspect for logouts that happen at the same time each day.
Third-party cookies, which changed
This is the cause people struggle with, because the site looks like it is broken.
A lot of sign-in systems work by redirecting you to a central identity provider, which sets a cookie, then sending you back. From the first site’s point of view that cookie came from a different domain, which makes it a third-party cookie. Chrome has been progressively restricting those, and when one is blocked the login round-trip completes and immediately forgets you — often in a loop.
You can see it happening. When a site blocks or limits cookies, Chrome shows an eye icon with a line through it on the right-hand side of the address bar. Click it, and allow third-party cookies for that site. Chrome offers a temporary or permanent allowance; permanent is fine for a site you trust and sign into.
Symptoms that fit this cause specifically:
- A sign-in page that bounces back to the sign-in page endlessly.
- Being logged out only of sites that use a single sign-on, such as a work Microsoft or Google account across several tools.
- Embedded content — a chat widget, a video, a comment system — asking you to sign in while the surrounding site knows who you are.
Blocking third-party cookies site-wide is a defensible privacy choice. Just know that this is the cost, and that per-site exceptions are how you pay it without losing the benefit everywhere else.
Sync does not carry sessions
Signing into Chrome and turning on sync brings your bookmarks, saved passwords, history, extensions and settings to a new device. It does not bring your sessions, and that is deliberate — a stolen session cookie is far more dangerous than a stolen bookmark, so Chrome never puts them in the sync stream.
So a new laptop asking you to sign in to everything once is correct behaviour,
not a fault. Saved passwords make it fast; chrome://password-manager is where
they live if you want to confirm they came across.
If you want to know where your Google account is currently active across devices, checking where your Google account is signed in walks through the session list and how to end one remotely.
The ones that are not Chrome’s fault
Some sessions expire because the site ended them, and no browser setting overrides a server.
- Banks, payroll and health portals commonly expire after 10–20 minutes of inactivity. This is intentional and not negotiable.
- Changing your password on an account invalidates sessions elsewhere, often including the one you are using.
- A VPN that changes your apparent country mid-session will get you signed out of services that bind a session to an IP range.
- Incognito windows discard everything on close by design. If you habitually browse in Incognito, every visit starts as a stranger.
What to expect
Clear-on-exit accounts for the large majority of “Chrome forgets me” cases, and switching it to an allow-list takes about two minutes to set up for the six or seven sites you actually care about.
Third-party cookie blocking is the one worth understanding properly rather than working around, because the restrictions have been tightening rather than loosening and the per-site allowance is the intended escape hatch.
If you have checked all four causes and one specific site still forgets you every few hours while everything else holds, accept it. That is the site’s session policy, and the only thing that changes it is the site.
A related confusion worth clearing up: the difference between what cache, cookies and browsing data each cost you when deleted is covered in cache vs cookies vs browsing data.