What is the Explore Button?
In the bottom-right corner of the Google Docs web interface, you will find a small floating button featuring a four-pointed star icon. This is the “Explore” button. When clicked, it opens a sidebar powered by Google Search and AI. It analyzes the text you have written in your document and automatically suggests related web articles, images, and research topics.
While intended to be a helpful research assistant, many writers find the constantly hovering star icon to be a visual distraction. If you already have your research open in another tab, or if you are writing creative fiction where web search results are completely irrelevant, the Explore button is just taking up space on your screen. You can completely disable this feature to achieve a cleaner interface.
How to Disable the Explore Button in Google Docs
Unfortunately, Google Docs does not have a simple toggle switch in its settings menu to hide this specific button. To remove it, you must use a third-party ad blocker (like uBlock Origin) to visually hide the HTML element.
- Ensure you have the uBlock Origin extension installed in Google Chrome.
- Open any document in Google Docs.
- Locate the Explore star icon in the bottom right corner.
- Right-click directly on the star icon.
- In the context menu that appears, select Block element… (This is a feature provided by uBlock Origin).
- A small popup window will appear in the bottom right, and the Explore button will be highlighted in red.
- Click the Create button in the popup window.
The Explore button will instantly vanish. Because the ad blocker applies this cosmetic filter to the docs.google.com domain, the star icon will remain permanently hidden on every single document you open in the future, giving you a completely distraction-free writing environment.