Shared with You links disappeared? The settings to check

A link disappears from Shared with You when one of its conditions stops holding: the sender has to be in your contacts, the conversation has to have Show in Shared with You on, and Safari has to be switched on in the Messages settings for Shared with You. It also leaves when someone picks Remove on it, and on iPhone the whole section hides if Suggestions is off on Safari's start page.

Shared with You only lists what arrives in Messages, so the conversation is the first place to look for a lost link. This page shows where the section lives, which setting to check for each cause, how to remove or switch it off on purpose, what it never collects, and where to keep a link you want to find next year.

What is Shared with You?

Shared with You is a section in Apple's own apps that lists the content people send you in Messages, labelled with who sent it. Apple organises it per app: Music, Apple TV, News, Photos, Podcasts and Safari each get their own Shared with You section, and each item carries a "From [Name]" label you can tap to reply in Messages.

For links, the section that matters is Safari's:

• iPhone and iPad: open a new tab and scroll past Favorites on the Start Page. Links shared with you sit below Suggestions. A button under each link preview opens the Messages conversation where it was shared.
• Mac: click Shared with You in Safari's sidebar. Click an item to open it, or click the sender's name to reply in Messages.

On a Mac, other apps show the same content under Shared or Shared with You in their sidebars, and a From button takes you back to the conversation.

Why did a Shared with You link disappear?

A Shared with You link disappears when a setting or a contact change stops Messages from feeding it to Safari, or when it was removed. Work through these in order.

1. The sender is not in your contacts. Content only appears in Shared with You if the sender is in your contacts, and on a Mac Safari shows only items from people in your Contacts app. If the person who sent the link is not saved in your contacts, nothing they send shows up there.
2. Show in Shared with You is off for that conversation. On iPhone or iPad, open the conversation, tap the contact or group icon, tap Info, and check Show in Shared with You. On a Mac, select the conversation, click Info, and check the same box.
3. Safari is switched off for Shared with You. On iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Apps > Messages > Shared with You and make sure Automatic Sharing is on and Safari is on. On a Mac, open Messages > Settings > Shared with You and make sure Safari is selected.
4. Suggestions are off on Safari's start page (iPhone). Open a new tab, scroll down, tap Edit, turn on Suggestions, then turn on Shared with You below Show In Suggestions.
5. Someone removed it. A link removed with Remove Link on iPhone, or Remove or Remove Share on a Mac, leaves the section.

When Shared with You is off for a conversation, Apple says the content still appears in the Messages thread. If you only need the link back once, open that conversation in Messages and look there.

How do I remove or turn off Shared with You?

You remove one link by touching and holding it (iPhone) or Control-clicking it (Mac), and you turn the feature off per person, per app or entirely from the Messages settings. The same switches that explain a missing link are the ones you use on purpose.

Remove one link

• In Safari on iPhone: touch and hold the preview image, then tap Remove Link.
• In other iPhone apps: touch and hold the thumbnail in the Shared with You section and tap Remove; the options vary by app.
• On a Mac: Control-click the content, or its From button, and choose Remove or Remove Share.

Turn it off for one person

• iPhone or iPad: open the conversation, tap the contact or group icon, tap Info, then turn off Show in Shared with You.
• Mac: select the conversation, click Info, then deselect Show in Shared with You.

Turn it off for one app, or everywhere

• iPhone or iPad: Settings > Apps > Messages > Shared with You, then turn off Automatic Sharing, or turn it off for a specific app such as Safari.
• Mac: Messages > Settings > Shared with You, then click Turn Off or deselect apps.

Turning it off for a conversation does not delete what that person sent. The links stay in the Messages thread; they just stop surfacing in Safari.

Which links does it show and which does it miss?

Shared with You shows links that arrive in Messages from people in your contacts, and misses everything else. Three limits follow from how Apple built it:

• Messages only. It only collects what arrives through Messages. A link someone sent you in another messaging app never reaches it.
• Contacts only. Content from someone who is not in your contacts never appears.
• Split by app. What one person sent you is spread across Music, TV, News, Photos, Podcasts and Safari rather than kept in one list.

The organising tools are thin. Apple documents three: pin, remove, and, in Safari on iPhone, moving a link into a Tab Group (touch and hold the preview, tap Open in Tab Group, then choose a new or existing group). Pinning happens in Messages: touch and hold the item and tap Pin, and it rises in Shared with You, in Messages search and in the conversation's details. On a Mac you can pin shared content to show it in its app even when Shared with You is off for that conversation. The iOS 27 edition of Apple's Safari guide describes the same features as the iOS 26 one.

The receiver can switch the section off per person or per app, so a sender cannot count on a link showing up there. It works as a reminder of what came through Messages. For keeping links, you need something else.

Where can I keep links someone sent me for good?

Keep a link for good by saving it into a place you own: a Safari bookmark, a Tab Group, or a link library that holds what people send you. Pinning in Messages helps you find it again, but Shared with You can still be switched off per person or per app.

Shareling is built for the second half of that job. It is a Mac, iPhone and iPad app for sending a link straight to one person, and the link lands in both your libraries. Here is how it stores what someone sends you, from its rulings and its code:

• A link exists once, in the sender's space. Your library is a view over your own private zone, the zones you own, and the zones people share with you (rulings S-01 and S-02 in docs/reference/research/link-dropper-rulings.md). When someone sends you a link it appears in your library without you saving it, and nothing is copied while you are both connected.
• Hide deletes nothing. Hiding a link flips a private flag on your side, and either person can hide any link, including one they sent (S-09). The link menu on Mac and iPhone offers Open, Favorite, Read later, Mark as read, Hide and Copy link, and none of them deletes the link.
• Unsend has a one-hour window. Shareling's rules let a sender unsend a link only within one hour of dropping it, counted from drop time (RetractionWindow.swift, S-09). The ruling is candid about the limit: the hour is a promise the app's own screens enforce, and a zone owner can always delete their own records.
• Removing a person copies their links to you first. When you remove someone, ChannelRemoval.swift copies every link in their zone into your own library as a new record stamped with their name, re-reads the library to check one copy exists per link, and only then revokes both shares (S-10). If the copy is incomplete it stops with nothing revoked, and it is safe to run again.

The trade-off is deliberate. Because each link lives only in the sender's space, there is no second copy to survive an unsend, which is why the unsend window is short (S-09). Removal is the one moment Shareling copies a link someone sent you, so what someone sent you stays yours after you part ways (S-10).

Two limits to know. Unsend and Remove person live in Shareling's sync code today; the link menus listed above are the actions the app's screens offer on a link, and neither is among them. And Shareling does not import your Messages history or Shared with You: its only import is Chrome bookmarks, on the Mac. A link that arrived in iMessage reaches Shareling only if you save it yourself, for example through the iPhone share sheet.

What travels with a link is the note the sender wrote. Your folders are private labels that never travel (S-04), and there are no read receipts (S-07). To dig up a link that is still in a conversation, see how to find links in iMessage.