In this brief tutorial, we show you why a new ‘Recently Viewed’ heading appears on your Safari Start Page and how to stop seeing a particular topic or the entire section.
iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 have added almost a dozen new features and improvements to Safari. One of them is a new Recently Viewed section that shows your recent tabs, organized by topic, on your browser Start Page.
Organizing Safari tabs by topic is another new feature that uses Apple Intelligence to automatically group your tabs into relevant topics. For instance, if you have several webpages open while researching which television to buy, chances are Safari will group them together, provided you have enabled this feature. It will also give the group a relevant name.
The Recently Viewed section shows big cards for each topic, and clicking it opens all the webpages under it. This means you can reopen multiple sites at once, thus eliminating the need to find those entries in browser history and click them individually.
In case you don’t want to open all tabs, click the “N Tabs” pill-shaped button to see which webpages are listed under it. From there, you can click one to open it.
While helpful, you can easily stop a particular topic or the entire Recently Viewed section from showing on your Safari Start Page.
You may want to do this if you let others use your computer or have people looking over your shoulder and don’t want them to easily see what you browsed recently. Remember that, unlike your favorite bookmakers, these topics featuring your recently used websites are created automatically by AI, and they may show favicons (site icons) or names you may not be comfortable having on the browser’s first page. The Recently Viewed section also shows topic cards for websites you accessed on other devices with the same Apple Account.
Hide a Recently Viewed item
Right-click or touch and hold the topic card, then select Hide Topic. This is helpful if you’d like to keep using the Recently Viewed feature, but don’t like a particular topic and would want to stop it from showing on the Safari Start Page.
Note that there is no second confirmation, and even undoing won’t work. So make sure you hide a topic only if you’re sure.
Remove the entire Recently Viewed section
In case you don’t want to use this new feature and would like to turn it off entirely, tap the Edit button on your Safari Start Page and disable Recently Viewed.
You can also right-click on an empty area on the Safari Start Page and uncheck Show Recently Viewed.
Here’s how it looks on iOS 27.
I have left Recently Viewed enabled on my Mac as it lets me reopen recent Claude chats with one click. But I have disabled it on my iPhone because I prefer a simple Start Page on the small screen with just my favorite website shortcuts.
Also, new in iOS and macOS 27: How to have Safari notify you of website changes and updates
