When you click on a Google Search result, you might occasionally notice that Google Chrome instantly scrolls you halfway down the page and highlights a specific sentence in bright yellow. This feature, known as “Scroll to Text Fragment,” was introduced by Google to help users immediately find the exact portion of a long article that answers their specific search query.
While this can be incredibly helpful for skimming long Wikipedia articles, many users find it disorienting. If you prefer to land at the top of a webpage and read the context before jumping to a specific paragraph, you might want to disable this automatic highlighting behavior.
Can You Disable Scroll to Text Fragment?
When Google first introduced this feature, they included a toggle in the hidden chrome://flags menu that allowed power users to disable it. However, as of recent versions of Google Chrome (version 90 and newer), Google has permanently removed that flag, making it impossible to disable the feature natively within the browser settings.
Fortunately, the open-source community has stepped in to provide a workaround.
How to Stop Automatic Highlighting Using an Extension
Because the highlighting relies on a specific URL structure (you will notice #:~:text= appended to the end of the web address), you can use a lightweight browser extension to strip this code before the page loads.
- Open Google Chrome on your desktop or laptop.
- Navigate to the Chrome Web Store.
- Search for an extension named Disable Scroll To Text Fragment (or click here to go directly to it).
- Click the blue Add to Chrome button.
- Click Add extension in the confirmation popup.
That is all you need to do. The extension runs silently in the background. The next time you click a search result that attempts to force a yellow highlight, the extension will instantly intercept the request, clean the URL, and load the webpage normally starting from the very top.