How to remove or hide shortcuts on Chrome’s new tab page

Updated 18 October 2026

To hide every shortcut, open a new tab, click Customize Chrome at the bottom right and turn off Show shortcuts. To remove one, point at it and use its three-dot menu or its X.

Hide all shortcuts

1. Open a new tab and click Customize Chrome at the bottom right.
2. Under Shortcuts, turn off Show shortcuts.

The row disappears from every new tab and nothing else on the page changes. Your shortcuts aren’t deleted: turn the switch back on and they return as they were.

Remove one shortcut

What appears when you point at a tile depends on which kind of shortcuts you use:

Chrome then shows “Shortcut removed” with an Undo button and a second button. On most visited sites it reads Restore all and brings back every site you’ve removed. On your own shortcuts it reads Restore default shortcuts, which throws away your list and starts again from your most visited sites, so use it with care.

Stop Chrome suggesting sites

Most visited tiles come from your browsing. To keep a row of shortcuts but choose them yourself, open Customize Chrome, select My shortcuts under Shortcuts, then edit or remove the starting tiles. Chrome describes that list as curated by you, and it doesn’t add sites to it on its own.

If something looks different

• There’s no Customize Chrome button. Your default search engine isn’t Google, so Chrome shows its simpler third-party new tab page. Its tiles are most visited sites; remove them one at a time with the X.
• The shortcuts vanished on their own. Newer versions of Chrome hide most visited shortcuts that go unused, with a message: “Shortcuts for your most visited sites were removed because you haven’t used them recently”, plus Undo. In Chromium’s code the default is about 60 days of new tabs without a single click, add or edit. Turn Show shortcuts back on to restore them; Chrome only does this once.
• Some tiles come from your organization. An administrator added them with a policy. You can hide them in Customize Chrome, and remove them only if the administrator allows it.

Hide the search box too

Chrome’s own new tab page always keeps the Google search box. For a new tab with no search box and no suggested sites, replace the page: Stackboard shows only the bookmarks you put there, in spaces and stacks, and your address bar still searches as usual. For the AI Mode button in that search box, see how to remove AI Mode from the new tab page.