Turn off Siri suggestions and lookups that send data off your Mac
· 6 min read
Three features send your typing to Apple’s servers as you go: Siri Suggestions in Spotlight, Siri Suggestions in Safari’s address bar, and the Look Up panel that opens when you force-click a word. Each has a checkbox. Turn them off and Spotlight searches only what is on the Mac, Safari sends queries only to your search engine, and Look Up shows the built-in dictionary alone. The switches are spread across three panes, so here is where each one is.
What actually leaves the Mac
With Siri Suggestions on, the characters you type into Spotlight or the Safari address bar are sent as you type so that Apple can return web results, weather, sports scores and app suggestions before you press Return. Apple’s privacy documentation says these requests use a rotating identifier rather than your Apple Account, and that approximate location is included when Location Services allow it. That is a reasonable design, and for many people the results are worth it.
If you would rather nothing left the machine when you search for a file, the point to understand is that the local index and the suggestions are separate. Turning suggestions off does not touch Spotlight’s ability to find your documents, apps and mail. It only stops the question being asked of the network.
Spotlight
- Open System Settings.
- On macOS Sequoia and later, click Spotlight in the sidebar. On Ventura and Sonoma, click Siri & Spotlight and scroll to the Spotlight section.
- In the list of result categories, untick Siri Suggestions.
- Look for “Help Apple Improve Search” below the list and turn it off. That one governs whether your Safari, Siri, Spotlight and Look Up queries are stored to improve Apple’s search products.
Unticking Siri Suggestions here also turns off the suggestions in Look Up, which is the panel that appears when you force-click or Control-Command-D a word. Look Up keeps working with the dictionary, thesaurus and anything else installed on the Mac; it stops fetching the web card at the bottom.
While you are in the list, it is a good moment to untick categories you never want in Spotlight anyway. Fewer categories means results arrive faster and the one you wanted is nearer the top.
Safari
- Open Safari, then Safari, Settings.
- Click Search.
- Untick “Include Siri Suggestions”.
- Consider unticking “Search Engine Suggestions” as well. That sends keystrokes to your search engine rather than Apple, but it is the same pattern: text leaves the Mac before you press Return.
- “Preload Top Hit in the background” fetches the first result before you choose it. Untick it if you want Safari to load only pages you actually pick.
With those off, the address bar still autocompletes from your own history and bookmarks, which is the part most people find useful.
Siri itself
If you do not use Siri, turn it off and the keyboard shortcut and menu bar icon go with it. On Sequoia and later the pane is System Settings, Apple Intelligence & Siri; on Ventura and Sonoma it is Siri & Spotlight. Turn the Siri switch off. macOS then offers to delete your Siri and Dictation history from Apple’s servers; on the same pane there is a “Siri & Dictation History” button that does this at any time.
On the same pane, a button labeled “Siri Suggestions & Privacy” (the wording moves slightly between versions) lists your apps. For each you can stop Siri learning from it and stop it appearing in suggestions. Leaving Siri on but trimming this list is a middle path: Siri still works when you invoke it, but stops building a picture of which apps you open and when.
Two related switches in Privacy & Security
These are not Siri, but they are the same question of what the Mac reports about you.
Apple Advertising. System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll to Apple Advertising, turn off Personalized Ads. Apple’s own ads in the App Store and News stop using your account activity for targeting. You still see ads; they are just not built from your history.
Analytics & Improvements. Same pane, one entry up. “Share Mac Analytics”, “Improve Siri & Dictation” and “Share with app developers” each send diagnostic data. Turning them off costs you nothing you would notice.
Related, and often the bigger concern: where new documents go by default. Save new documents to your Mac instead of iCloud covers that switch.
Doing all of this at once
There is nothing wrong with clicking through five panes. If you do it on more than one Mac, or you want to be able to reverse it cleanly, Mainspring has power-ups for “disable Siri”, “no lookup leaks” and “no personalized ads”, and a Privacy and Security recipe that applies them as a set along with the password-on-sleep setting. Each records the previous value first, so the whole recipe reverts as a set if you decide Spotlight’s web results were worth having after all.
Be clear about what none of this does. It does not stop apps you install from talking to their own servers, it does not affect iCloud sync, and it does not make the Mac anonymous on the network. It closes a specific set of channels where typed text was leaving the machine on the way to a result you may not have wanted.
Questions
Will Spotlight still find my files with Siri Suggestions off? Yes. Files, apps, contacts, mail, calendar events and everything else in the local index are unaffected. What disappears is the row of web results, and things like weather or a currency conversion that needed a live source. The built-in calculator and unit conversion keep working because they run locally.
Is dictation affected? Only if you turned Siri off and accepted the offer to delete history. Dictation itself is controlled in System Settings, Keyboard, under Dictation. On Apple silicon Macs, dictation in supported languages is processed on the device.
I turned Siri off and the menu bar icon is still there. Open System Settings, Control Center, scroll to Siri, and set it to “Don’t Show in Menu Bar”. The two switches are independent.
Does turning off Siri Suggestions change what my iPhone does? No. Each device has its own set of switches, and the Mac ones do not sync.