We have all done it.
You are endlessly scrolling your feed. You spot a completely random interaction between two people you know, and your brain immediately stops. You think, “Wait a minute. Since when do they know each other?” Maybe it’s two coworkers from completely different departments. Maybe it’s your cousin commenting on your old college roommate’s photo. Suddenly, you have a burning desire to know exactly when that digital handshake took place.
A decade ago, finding this out was incredibly easy. Facebook practically broadcasted everyone’s social movements. Now? Mark Zuckerberg has buried the feature deep under layers of modern privacy settings.
The tool still exists. It is called the “See Friendship” page. But how you access it and whether it actually works depends entirely on who you are investigating. Here is exactly how to find a Facebook friendship anniversary today, and why the old tricks might be failing you.
Finding Your Own Friendship Anniversary
Let’s start with the easy scenario. If you just want to take a trip down memory lane and find out exactly when you became friends with someone, Facebook fully supports this. It is a built-in feature, and it takes about five seconds to pull up.
Open the Facebook app or go to the desktop site.
Navigate directly to your friend’s profile page.
Look for the button with the three horizontal dots (…). On mobile, this is usually right next to the “Message” button under their profile picture.
Tap it to open the profile settings menu.
Tap See Friendship.
Boom. You instantly get a dedicated, private scrapbook page. Facebook will show you the exact month and year you connected, how many mutual friends you share, and a timeline of the photos and posts you have both been tagged in.
The Big Question: Can You See When Two OTHER People Became Friends?
This is why you are actually here, isn’t it? You don’t want to look at your own profile. You want to see the timeline of two other people.
This used to be a glaring loophole in the platform. You could easily manipulate a URL to force Facebook to spit out a detailed history of any two people on the site. Then, massive privacy regulations completely changed the internet. Meta locked down the platform to avoid multi-billion dollar lawsuits. They realized that letting random users map out the relationships of strangers was a massive security liability.
Today, the famous “URL Trick” still technically exists, but it comes with a massive catch: It only works if both users have their friend lists set to “Public.”
If even one of those people has their privacy set to “Friends Only” or “Only Me,” the trick hits a brick wall. You will just get a broken link or a blank page.
How to Try the URL Trick Anyway
If you think their privacy settings are loose enough, you can give it a shot. Put your phone down for this one. You need a desktop browser to make it work properly.
Find their exact usernames. You need the custom URL handle, not their display name. Go to the first person’s profile and look at the address bar. It will look something like
facebook.com/john.doe.123. Copy that last part. Do the exact same thing for the second person.Build the link. Open a brand new tab. You are going to type in this exact formula:
www.facebook.com/friendship/Username1/Username2/Hit enter.
If the privacy gods are smiling and their accounts are fully public, Facebook will actually generate a custom friendship page for those two people. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of that timeline, you will see the exact year they clicked “Accept.”
If it redirects you to your own home feed? You are locked out. Their privacy settings blocked you.
The “Digital Breadcrumbs” Method
Let’s be realistic. In 2026, almost nobody leaves their friend list fully public. People are paranoid about data scraping, and rightly so. If the URL trick fails, you cannot force the system to give you a date. You have to look for digital breadcrumbs instead.
There is a manual workaround that gets you pretty close to the answer.
Go to one of their profiles. Do not use the main Facebook search bar at the top of the screen. Instead, look for the little magnifying glass icon specifically located on their profile page menu. This allows you to search exclusively within their timeline.
Type in the other person’s name.
This filters their entire history for any public interaction with that specific individual. Scroll to the very bottom of the search results. The absolute oldest post, tagged photo, or awkward “Happy Birthday!” wall message is usually a dead giveaway for when they first crossed paths online.
It is not an exact calendar date, but it puts you in the right ballpark.
At the end of the day, Facebook intentionally made this difficult. We expect a much higher level of digital privacy now. You can easily track your own history, but if you want to play digital detective with someone else’s social life, you are going to have to do a little manual digging.
