The Unwanted Hyperlink
Google Docs is designed for collaboration and connectivity. Because of this, it features an aggressive auto-formatting engine. If you type anything that resembles a web address (like “www.example.com”) or an email address (like “[email protected]”), and press the Spacebar or the Enter key, Docs will instantly convert that plain text into a clickable, blue, underlined hyperlink. While useful for creating digital resource lists, this behavior is incredibly frustrating if you are writing technical documentation, a print-only manuscript, or drafting code snippets where URLs must remain as raw, unformatted text strings.
Disabling Link Auto-Detection
To keep your text clean and stop Google Docs from automatically generating hyperlinks out of URLs and email addresses, you must disable the specific auto-formatting rule in the preferences menu.
Open your Google Docs document. In the top menu bar, click on Tools. From the dropdown menu, select Preferences. A settings dialogue box will appear in the center of your screen. Click on the General tab at the top of this box (it is usually selected by default). Look down the list of options for the checkbox labeled Automatically detect links. Click this checkbox so that it is unchecked (empty). Click the blue OK button at the bottom of the dialogue box to save your changes. From this point forward, when you type a URL or an email address, it will remain exactly as you typed it—as standard black text—and will not transform into a clickable link.