How to Turn Off Gmail Nudges and Smart Reply

Gmail nudges the messages back to the top of your inbox when it thinks you forgot to reply, and Smart Reply drops one-tap suggested responses under messages it can guess an answer for. Both are on by default, and both are easy to want gone the first time a nudge resurfaces an email you deliberately let go cold. If you searched for how to turn off Gmail nudges expecting one switch, the reason it hasn't stuck is that there isn't one — there are three.

Reply nudges, follow-up nudges, and Smart Reply's suggested-reply chips are three independent settings. Turning off one leaves the other two running, which is why people report disabling nudges and still seeing a message resurface, or turning off Smart Reply on the website and still seeing chips on their phone. This guide goes through all three, on desktop and in the mobile app, plus what to check when a toggle doesn't hold.

The short answer#

On Gmail for the web: click the gear icon, choose See all settings, and stay on the General tab. Scroll to the Nudges section and uncheck Suggest emails to reply to and Suggest emails to follow up on. A few lines further down, find Smart Reply and select Smart Reply off. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page — the change applies immediately.

On the Gmail app for Android or iOS: open the menu icon, tap Settings, and tap the account you want to change. Under Nudges, turn off both the reply and follow-up suggestions. Under Smart Reply — labeled Smart Reply on Android, a plain toggle on iOS — turn suggested replies off. Repeat per account; the mobile app doesn't read your desktop settings, and the desktop settings don't read the app's.

Before you start#

A quick note on why you're seeing these in the first place. Gmail's nudge logic watches how long a thread has sat without a reply from you and, separately, how long it's been since someone replied to a message you sent. When either crosses an internal threshold — usually a few days, and Gmail doesn't publish the exact number — it resurfaces the thread at the top of your inbox with a small prompt. Smart Reply is unrelated: it scans an incoming message for a question or request it can pattern-match, and offers up to three short reply chips you can send with a tap.

Two things worth knowing before you start flipping toggles:

• Settings are per Google Account, but the web version and the Gmail app version of that same account store Nudges and Smart Reply separately. Turning nudges off at mail.google.com does not turn them off in the phone app signed into the same address.
• If you manage more than one Gmail account, each one keeps its own Nudges and Smart Reply settings. You'll repeat the steps below for every account you want changed.
• Smart Compose — the grey inline text-completion suggestions that appear while you type — is a third, unrelated feature with its own toggle. It doesn't turn off with Nudges or Smart Reply, and it isn't covered here.

Turn off nudges and Smart Reply on desktop#

The two Nudges checkboxes and the Smart Reply selector live on the same settings tab, a few sections apart.

1. 1

   Open Gmail settings

   Sign in at mail.google.com, click the gear icon in the top-right corner, then click See all settings. This opens the full settings page on the General tab.

2. 2

   Turn off reply nudges

   Scroll down to the Nudges section and uncheck the box next to Suggest emails to reply to. This is the nudge that resurfaces messages you haven't answered.

3. 3

   Turn off follow-up nudges

   In the same Nudges section, uncheck Suggest emails to follow up on. This is the separate nudge for messages you sent that never got a reply — unchecking only the first box stops reply prompts but leaves follow-up prompts running.

4. 4

   Turn off Smart Reply

   Scroll further down to the Smart Reply section and select Smart Reply off. This removes the one-tap suggested-reply chips under incoming messages, and it's a separate control from both nudge checkboxes above.

5. 5

   Save changes

   Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes. Gmail reloads and all three settings apply immediately — no sign-out or cache clearing needed.

Turn off suggested replies in the Gmail app (Android and iOS)#

The mobile app groups the same three controls differently, and the exact wording shifts slightly by platform.

1. 1

   Open the app's account settings

   Tap the menu icon in the top-left corner, scroll down, and tap Settings. If you have more than one account added, tap the one you want to change — the rest of these steps apply to that account only.

2. 2

   Turn off both nudge types

   Scroll to Nudges (labeled Replies and Follow-Ups on some app versions) and turn off both toggles: one for emails you haven't replied to, one for emails where you're waiting on a reply.

3. 3

   Turn off Smart Reply

   On Android, scroll to General, then Smart Reply, and uncheck Show suggested replies when available. On iOS, find the Smart Reply toggle on the same account settings screen and tap it off.

4. 4

   Repeat for each account

   If you use more than one Gmail address in the app, go back to the account list and repeat the last two steps — the app treats each signed-in account independently.

Platform differences#

A quick reference for what's where, since the three settings don't sit in identical places on every platform.

What to do when it doesn't work#

Most cases of a nudge or a reply chip reappearing after you've turned it off come down to one of four things.

• Wrong account — if you manage several Gmail addresses, double-check you changed the setting on the one where the nudge showed up, not whichever account happened to be open.
• A web change with an app symptom, or the reverse — since the two are stored separately, a nudge you disabled on desktop can still appear in the app until you repeat the steps there.
• A stale app session — force-close and reopen the Gmail app, or update it from the App Store or Play Store. Older app builds occasionally hold onto the previous setting until the next full sync.
• A Google Workspace admin policy — see the note below.

A faster way to stop chasing follow-ups#

Turning off nudges stops Gmail from reminding you — it doesn't change which messages actually need a reply. That's still a manual scan of the inbox, and the messages that genuinely matter don't come with a countdown timer attached.

AI Emaily's triage runs on the content of each message rather than a fixed number of days since it arrived, so it flags what needs a reply the moment it lands instead of days later. In Copilot mode, every suggested reply is drafted from a Personal Context brain you set up yourself, not from generic pattern-matching, and nothing sends until you approve it. We build AI Emaily. If manually checking Settings every time a nudge annoys you feels like a workaround for a bigger triage problem, the auto-triage layer described at /features/ai-email-assistant is built for exactly that. A 7-day free trial is available at /pricing.