Turn off Siri Suggestions on macOS: a step-by-step privacy reset

Siri Suggestions is the umbrella name for the predictions macOS surfaces in Spotlight, Safari, Mail, Messages, the Share sheet, and a handful of other places — the "you might want to text this person", "you might want to open this app", "here is a top hit from the web" rows that appear before you finish typing. The system is convenient. It is also a quiet network surface that most users have never audited.

This guide is the calm version of "turn off Siri Suggestions everywhere". It walks through each toggle that affects Spotlight in particular, explains what each one does on Tahoe 26, and ends with a verification step so you can confirm the result.

What Siri Suggestions actually is

Two distinct systems sit behind the name:

On-device predictions. macOS watches local signals — which apps you open in the morning, who you message back quickly, which Safari sites you revisit — and uses an on-device model to rank suggestions. This part does not send your behaviour to Apple.
Network-sourced suggestions. Web answers, App Store hits, news, movies, music — these require a query to Apple's servers. Apple's Spotlight Suggestions disclosure describes the request shape: the query, an approximate region, the device type, and a rotating short-lived identifier.

Disabling "Siri Suggestions" in System Settings does not, by itself, disable every network-sourced row in Spotlight. There are at least three toggles that have to line up before Spotlight stops talking to Apple's servers entirely.

The three toggles, in order

Toggle 1 — Apple Intelligence (Tahoe 26 only).

On hardware that supports it, Apple Intelligence is the top-level switch for the on-device language model layer and the Private Cloud Compute path. System Settings → Apple Intelligence → master switch off. Without this off, individual app toggles can re-enable inference on specific surfaces.

Apple's Apple Intelligence privacy and security guide is the canonical reference. It also describes what Private Cloud Compute promises if you do leave it on — for some readers the architecture is reassuring enough to keep it; this guide assumes you have decided you want it off.

Toggle 2 — Spotlight → Search Results.

System Settings → Spotlight → Search Results. This pane controls which result categories appear in the Spotlight panel. Anything network-sourced should be unchecked:

Suggestions from Apple
Web Searches
Movies
Music
News
App Store

You can leave Applications, System Settings, Documents, and any other local-only categories enabled. Those use the on-device index and never call out.

Toggle 3 — Spotlight → Siri Suggestions.

A separate, easy-to-miss toggle that controls whether the predicted-apps and predicted-contacts rows appear above search results. Uncheck it. macOS removes the Suggestions section from Spotlight immediately.

Per-app toggles that also affect Spotlight

A handful of system apps have their own "Siri & Search" settings panes that feed predictions into Spotlight. Walking through each is tedious but worth doing once:

Safari → Search → Include Siri Suggestions — uncheck.
Safari → Search → Preload Top Hit in the background — uncheck (this is a separate network call).
Mail → Smart Reply / Smart Compose — uncheck if present (on by default with Apple Intelligence enabled).
Notes → suggestions — uncheck.
Photos → Memories suggestions — uncheck.

Each app has its own pane under System Settings → Apps → [App Name] → Siri & Search. The fast path is to walk through every app in that list and disable both "Learn from this app" and "Show in Search". Apple's keyboard shortcuts and accessibility guide and the per-app Siri & Search pages document what each toggle actually changes.

Stop sending search ranking samples to Apple

System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. There is a switch labelled "Improve Search & Spotlight" (the exact wording varies across macOS releases). When enabled, macOS occasionally sends Apple anonymous samples of your Spotlight queries and result clicks to improve ranking models. Independent of every other toggle on this page. Off.

While you are in the same pane, the broader "Share Mac Analytics" and "Share iCloud Analytics" toggles are also reasonable to turn off if you have not already. None of them are large telemetry volumes, but the cumulative effect of all of them being on is real.

Verifying the result

Once everything above is off, verify in two ways.

First, the visible test. Open Spotlight, type a query that would previously have surfaced a web result — say, the name of a popular website or a recent news term. You should see only local matches: applications, files, dictionary lookups. No web hits, no App Store hits, no Siri-style "top hit".

Second, the network test. Install a network filter — Little Snitch and LuLu are the two most-used on macOS — and watch outbound connections while you type into Spotlight for a minute. With Siri Suggestions fully off, you should see no traffic from Spotlight, corespeechd, assistantd, or parsecd during normal queries. (You may still see brief background connections from those processes during system events; we are looking specifically for traffic that correlates with keystrokes in Spotlight.)

What you lose, in honest terms

Turning Siri Suggestions off across the board does cost you real conveniences:

The morning "open Slack, then Mail, then Cron" predicted-apps row.
Inline web answers in Spotlight.
App Store suggestions when you search for something macOS knows there is no installed match for.
Smart Reply in Mail, Smart Compose in Notes (if those were on).
The Memories surface in Photos based on event detection.

For some users none of those matter. For others one of them does. You can re-enable any toggle individually without re-enabling the others — Apple's settings are fine-grained even if the names overlap.

A pragmatic alternative

If your goal was specifically to remove Spotlight's network surface from your daily launcher — not to disable every Siri feature — there is a shorter path. Rebind the ⌘Space hotkey to a launcher that has no network surface to begin with, and leave Spotlight's panel for occasional Finder-style search.

CmdSpace is one such launcher. Its index is local-only and lives at ~/Library/Application Support/CmdSpace/index. Zero outbound network calls — you can verify with Little Snitch the same way you verified Spotlight. $29 one-time, 60-day free trial, no subscription. The Spotlight-to-CmdSpace migration guide walks through detaching ⌘Space and trimming Spotlight's scope; the Spotlight privacy explainer has the longer write-up of what each Spotlight surface actually sends.

You do not have to commit to one or the other. Most users I know end up running both: Spotlight pared down to local results only, and a second launcher on ⌘Space for the day-to-day. That combination preserves the parts of Spotlight that work well (Mail and Notes search, Finder integration) and takes the parts that talk to Apple out of the daily critical path.