Most organizations have years of external file sharing they can't see and haven't cleaned up. Files get shared with vendors, partners, and personal accounts, and that access rarely gets revisited. Over time, it piles up: shares to companies you no longer work with, files still open to employees who left years ago, entire Shared Drives with no active owner.

External Share Discovery gives you a single, comprehensive view of every file, folder, and Shared Drive your organization has shared externally in Google Drive—no more piecing it together from the admin console, support tickets, or guesswork. It surfaces the risky long tail that manual reviews miss, groups exposure by external domain so you know where to focus first, and gives you audit-ready evidence of your sharing posture whenever leadership or an auditor asks for it.

You'll need to connect our Google Drive connected app by going to Settings > Connected Apps and going through the steps to connect Google Drive into your Nudge Security tenant.

Nudge Security scans your Google Workspace and inventories every externally shared file, folder, and Shared Drive across your tenant. From there, you get:

Summary stats. At a glance: total external shares, total items at risk, total orphaned shares across files and drives, total personal email shares, and total number of files not accessed in 90 days or more.

Domain-level grouping. A domain summary widget ranks external companies by how much they've been shared with. Click a domain to filter the full table down to everything shared with it—so you can prioritize cleanup by impact instead of working file by file.

The external shares table. A flat, sortable table with one row per externally shared item. Each row shows the item type and name, the owner (flagged if their account has been deactivated), which external collaborators have access and at what permission level, whether access was granted directly or inherited from a parent folder or Shared Drive, when it was last accessed or modified, and any risk insights that apply. Combine filters—by item type, domain, permission level, last-accessed window, and more—to narrow in on exactly what you're looking for.

Item detail view. Click into any item for the full picture: its complete path, parent folder or Shared Drive, data sensitivity label (if one's applied), owner status, and a list of every external collaborator with their permission level, access history, and when their share was created. You'll also see the 10 most recent activities on the item.

Risk insights. Every externally shared item is automatically checked against a set of risk conditions and flagged accordingly, so you don't have to go looking for trouble—it's already surfaced. Insights you'll see include:

Because Google's activity data only goes back so far, dates outside that window show as "+90 days ago" or "+180 days ago" rather than a specific date—so you always know a share is old, even if we can't pin down exactly how old.

Discovery is only useful if you can clean up what it surfaces. From the item detail view:

Revoke access. Open the Access and permissions tab on any file, folder, or Shared Drive to see its full collaborator list, filterable by domain, role, and status. Select one or more collaborators and revoke their access on the spot—no need to leave Nudge Security or dig through Google Drive's own sharing settings.

Switch public folders to restricted. For folders shared via a public link, the Shared link section lets you flip access from Public to Restricted in one step, instantly limiting the folder and its contents to its listed collaborators only.