Workspace Guard

Safety controls for Google Workspace: hide image & video search, Explore, emojis, GIFs and embeds. Managed by your administrator.

Workspace Guard lets schools and families switch off the risky corners of Google Workspace — the features that turn Docs, Slides and Drive into an unfiltered search engine. Content filters block websites. But inside a Google Doc, a student can still search the entire web for images, insert YouTube videos into Slides, play videos from Drive, and browse GIFs and emojis — all on google.com, all invisible to normal filtering. Workspace Guard closes those doors at the feature level. WHAT IT CAN BLOCK (each toggle is independent): • Image search inside Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Drawings ("Search the web" insertion) • YouTube video search and insertion in Slides and Forms • The Explore panel in Docs, Sheets and Slides • Emoji pickers and emoji reactions • GIFs and stickers • Link preview cards in Docs • Video playback in the Drive previewer • Embedded YouTube players • On Google Search: Lens / search-by-image, AI Overviews and AI Mode, interactive doodle games, and the Short Videos vertical • Optionally, the entire Google Images vertical BUILT FOR ADMINISTRATORS All settings are managed centrally through the Google Admin console (managed policy) — force-install the extension, tick the features to block, done. No accounts to create, nothing for students to configure or bypass. It also works on family computers: install it and the protective defaults apply immediately. PRIVACY Workspace Guard collects nothing. No browsing history, no page content, no analytics, no accounts. All filtering happens locally in your browser. The only network request the extension makes is downloading its own updated blocking rules — which is also why it keeps working when Google changes its interface, without waiting for an extension update. Workspace Guard is built and maintained by Technology Awareness Group (TAG), which has operated content-filtering infrastructure for schools and families for years. Free for TAG filter customers.