On macOS 26, check the Spotlight history
1. Press ⌘Space to open Spotlight.
2. Press ⌘4 to switch to the clipboard list.
3. Type a word you remember from the item, then press Enter to paste it.
The window is 8 hours by default. Retention options are 30 minutes, 8 hours and 7 days, set with the Clipboard switch in System Settings, then Spotlight. Anything older than your setting has been dropped, and nothing tells you it happened.
An empty panel usually means the switch is off. In that case there is no record to search, and turning it on now starts recording from now.
Two more limits worth knowing before you spend time here. The history is plain text only, so a copied image was never stored. And it exists only on macOS 26.
A recorded history answers this question in a second, because the item is already on disk with its source app and timestamp. Search by the app you copied from, or by a date range, and the list narrows to a handful of rows.
Recognised text inside copied screenshots is searchable too, so a licence key you only ever saw in a picture can be found by typing part of it.
When there is nothing to recover
The clipboard is one value in memory. macOS does not log it, does not cache the previous item, and does not write it to a temporary file you could dig out. Undelete tools work on files that still have data on disk. An overwritten clipboard leaves nothing behind, so no app can go back and get it.
What is often recoverable is the source you copied from. If you copied from a text field, ⌘Z in that app may still walk the field back. If you copied from a web page, your browser history will find the page again. If it came from a document, Time Machine or the app's own version history holds earlier drafts. If it came from a chat, the message is still there.
That is a different job from recovering a clipboard, and it is usually the faster route.
The trap
A clipboard manager only helps from the moment you install it. It cannot see copies you made before it was running. Installing one today does not bring back this morning's link, and any page promising otherwise is selling you something. The value is that this is the last time you lose one.
What I use
For free clipboard history, Maccy does the job. Open source, MIT, about 1.6 MB, 200 items by default and up to 999.
I built Klipto because I wanted more than a list. Every copy goes into a local database with no expiry until you set one, and the History window filters by content type, date range and source app. Nothing syncs anywhere. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, so it also covers the Macs that Tahoe's history leaves out.