The Intrusive Hyperlinks
Google Chrome on mobile devices (and increasingly in desktop testing builds) features intelligent text parsing. When Chrome detects a string of text that looks like a physical street address, a phone number, or an email address within a regular paragraph on a webpage, it automatically highlights it and turns it into a clickable, blue hyperlink. Clicking it will automatically launch Google Maps or your phone dialer. While convenient for restaurant websites, this automatic highlighting is incredibly annoying if you are reading a historical document, reviewing code, or looking at a spreadsheet interface rendered in HTML where you just want to copy the raw text without accidentally triggering a third-party application.
Disabling Touch to Search and Parsing
To stop Google Chrome from automatically highlighting addresses and phone numbers and turning them into interactive links, you must disable the browser’s contextual search and parsing features.
This is most prominent on Android. Open the Google Chrome app. Tap the three vertical dots in the top right corner and select Settings. Scroll down the settings list and tap on Google Services. Look for the setting labeled Touch to Search. Tap on it, and toggle the master switch at the top to the Off position. By turning off Touch to Search, Chrome stops actively analyzing the semantic context of the text on the page for quick actions. If you still see phone numbers turning into links on desktop, it is often a feature of a specific extension (like Skype or a VoIP dialer) rather than native Chrome. Go to chrome://extensions and disable any communication plugins that have permission to “read and change all your data on the websites you visit.”