How To Disable Spotlight Search On Iphone

Spotlight Search is something on your iPhone that will allow you to simultaneously search different apps on your device, as well as the Internet, for terms that you type into the search field. You can access Spotlight Search by swiping down on your Home screen.

But many searches that you execute in Spotlight Search will include options from the Internet, Wikipedia, iTunes and more, which you may prefer not to see. These options are included as Spotlight Suggestions, and it is a feature that you can turn off if you do not want to use it.

Disabling Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight Search on an iPhone

The steps in this article were written using an iPhone 6 Plus, in iOS 8.4. These steps may vary for iPhone models running other versions of iOS. The feature that we will be turning off in the image below is the one that displays the Wikipedia article and the Suggested Website section in the image below.

spotlight suggestions turned on

Note that the Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight Search are different than the Spotlight Suggestions in the Safari browser. If you wish to turn those off, then you can do so by going to Settings > Safari and turning off the Spotlight Suggestions option.

Step 1: Open the Settings menu.

open settings

Step 2: Select the General option.

select the general option

Step 3: Select the Spotlight Search option.

select the spotlight search option

Step 4: Tap the Spotlight Suggestions option to turn it off. There will be no blue check mark next to the option when it is turned off.

turn off the spotlight suggestions option

Now, when you execute the sample search that we performed at the beginning of this article, you see this screen instead.

spotlight suggestions turned off

Spotlight Search is a great feature on your iPhone, and is something that you can customize to suit your own usage. For example, you can add Apps to Spotlight Search to make it easier to find apps when you have installed a lot of them. This article will show you how to add them to Spotlight Search.

Matthew Burleigh has been writing tech tutorials since 2008. His writing has appeared on dozens of different websites and been read over 50 million times.

After receiving his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science he spent several years working in IT management for small businesses. However, he now works full time writing content online and creating websites.

His main writing topics include iPhones, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, Android, and Photoshop, but he has also written about many other tech topics as well.

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