How to Remove the Spotlight Icon From the Mac Menu Bar

Be honest: when did you last click the magnifying glass? Spotlight lives on Cmd+Space for virtually everyone, which makes its menu bar icon pure decoration — and on a notch MacBook, decoration costs real space. macOS lets you remove the icon while leaving search itself completely untouched. There are two routes, and both are reversible in seconds.

Hide it from Control Center settings

1. Open System Settings → Control Center.
2. Scroll down to the Menu Bar Only section.
3. Set Spotlight to Don't Show in Menu Bar.

The magnifying glass vanishes immediately. The dropdown sits in the same place on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, and restoring the icon is the same dropdown set back to Show in Menu Bar.

Or Cmd-drag it away

1. Hold down the Cmd key.
2. Drag the magnifying glass out of the menu bar — downward works.
3. Release, and the icon disappears.

This is the same gesture that rearranges menu bar icons, taken one step further; dropping an icon off the bar removes it, and the Control Center dropdown flips to Don't Show behind the scenes. The two methods are literally the same setting, so use whichever is in reach and undo from either end.

Search doesn't change at all

The icon is only a button that opens Spotlight — removing it removes nothing else. Cmd+Space still summons search from anywhere; Spotlight keeps indexing your files exactly as before. That's worth stressing because people conflate three different intentions here:

• Hide the icon — cosmetic, this article, zero side effects.
• Change the shortcut — if Cmd+Space clashes with an input-source switcher or app launcher, that's a Keyboard Shortcuts setting, not a menu bar one.
• Rein in Spotlight itself — excluding folders or trimming result categories lives in Spotlight's own settings pane.

If your goal was the first one, you're done — one dropdown, fully reversible, and your menu bar breathes a little easier.

What can and can't leave the bar

Spotlight sits in Control Center's Menu Bar Only section alongside Siri and Time Machine — the three system icons that exist purely as menu bar buttons, all removable with the same kind of dropdown. The two immovable residents are the Clock and the Control Center icon itself; everything else Apple puts in the bar can be dismissed or repositioned with a Cmd-drag. Third-party app icons are their own story, managed inside each app rather than in System Settings.

It's also worth saying what doesn't exist: there's no supported Terminal command for this particular switch, so ignore any guide pushing a defaults write incantation for the Spotlight icon — the dropdown and the Cmd-drag are the two legitimate routes, and they're faster anyway. Users of third-party launchers like Raycast or Alfred, who've usually remapped their muscle memory away from the magnifying glass entirely, lose exactly nothing by hiding it; the icon was a monument to a shortcut they stopped using years ago.

On a notch MacBook, this removal is higher-value than it looks: the bar loses a wide slice to the camera housing, and when icons overflow, macOS hides them silently rather than scrolling. Every system icon you dismiss deliberately is one accidental disappearance prevented. The magnifying glass — a button for a shortcut your thumbs already know — is the classic first cut, and if you ever need it back for a demo or a houseguest, the dropdown restores it in five seconds.

Make the keyboard route even better

Now that Spotlight is keyboard-only, sharpen it: Spotlight search operators — kind:, date:, boolean AND/OR — turn the little search bar into a precision tool.