The Unwanted Hyperlinks
Google Docs is designed to seamlessly integrate with the web. Because of this, it features an aggressive autocorrect behavior regarding URLs. If you type anything that resembles a web address (e.g., “example.com”, “www.digitash.com”) or an email address, and then press the spacebar or Enter key, Docs will automatically turn that plain text into a blue, clickable hyperlink. While fantastic for writing emails or resource lists, this is incredibly annoying if you are writing a technical manual, a coding tutorial, or a printed document where you explicitly need the URL to remain as standard, unformatted black text.
Disabling Automatic Link Detection
To keep your text exactly as you typed it and stop Google Docs from automatically adding links to URLs and email addresses, you must turn off the specific link-detection feature in the preferences.
Open the Google Docs document you are currently working on. Navigate to the main menu bar at the top and click on Tools. From the drop-down menu that appears, select Preferences. A dialogue box will pop up in the center of your screen. Ensure you are looking at the General tab (it usually opens to this by default). Look through the list of checkbox options for the one labelled Automatically detect links. Click the checkbox to remove the checkmark, completely disabling the feature. Finally, click the blue OK button at the bottom to save your changes. From now on, you can type any web address, and Docs will leave it as plain, unlinked text.