Redact a PDF Online — Permanently Remove Text & Images (Free)

Black out or find-and-redact sensitive text in a PDF for free. Redacted pages are rebuilt as flattened images so nothing can be recovered by selecting text — everything happens in your browser.

What it does

Mark what needs to disappear from a PDF before you share it — a name, an account number, a signature, an address — and export a copy where that content is genuinely gone, not just visually covered. You can draw redaction boxes by hand on any page, or use “Find & redact” to search the PDF’s real text and automatically box every match across the whole document. Pages you don’t touch keep their original text and file size; only the pages you mark are rebuilt.

How it works

A redacted page isn’t just a black box drawn on top of the original — it’s rebuilt entirely as a flattened image, so the covered text can’t be recovered by selecting it, copying it, or peeling back a layer in a PDF editor. Pages with no boxes are copied through untouched, keeping their original selectable text and size. “Find & redact” searches the PDF’s actual text layer (not OCR) and converts each match’s real position into a redaction box using the same coordinate math the page was rendered with, padded slightly on every side so a match is never left partially exposed — it can’t find text inside a scanned image, since a scan has no text layer to search. Every box edit is undoable, and a page’s boxes can be copied to any range of other pages at once, useful for redacting a repeated header, page number, or stamp without drawing it by hand on every page. Nothing is uploaded — the PDF is read, edited, and rebuilt entirely in your browser.

How to use it

1. Drop a PDF onto the upload area.
2. Draw boxes by hand on any page — drag to create one, drag its handles to resize, or click and hit Delete to remove it — or use “Find & redact” in the sidebar to search for text and mark every match automatically, on this page or the whole document.
3. Choose Black out or Pixelate mode before drawing (pixelate is marked “not secure” since a determined viewer can sometimes reverse a blur — black out is the safer default for anything genuinely sensitive).
4. Use “Copy this page’s boxes there” to apply the same redaction positions to a range of other pages, or leave the range blank to apply to every page.
5. Made a mistake? “Undo last change” reverts the most recent edit on the page you’re viewing.
6. Zoom in for precision on small text using the zoom control above the page.
7. Once every page is reviewed, check the confirmation box and click “Redact & download.”

FAQ

Is the redacted content actually removed, or just covered up? Actually removed. Any page with at least one box is rebuilt as a flattened image — the original vector text underneath the box no longer exists in the exported file, so it can’t be recovered by selecting text, using “find,” or opening the file in another PDF editor.

Does “Find & redact” work on a scanned PDF? No — it searches the PDF’s real text layer, which a scanned page doesn’t have. For a scanned document, draw boxes by hand instead. If you’re not sure whether a PDF is scanned, the PDF scan checker can tell you before you start.

Is Pixelate actually secure? No — it’s labeled “not secure” deliberately. Heavily pixelated or blurred text can sometimes be partially reconstructed. Use Black out for anything genuinely sensitive; use Pixelate only when you want to obscure something less critical, like a background face in a photo.

Will redacting a page change its size or quality? Yes, slightly — a redacted page is re-rendered as an image, so its file size and appearance change (no longer sharp, infinitely-zoomable vector text). Pages you don’t mark are left completely untouched, at their original size and quality.

Can I redact the same text across every page at once? Yes, two ways: “Find & mark on every page” searches and boxes every occurrence of a phrase across the whole document in one pass, and “Copy this page’s boxes there” repeats a specific box position (useful for a stamp, logo, or page footer) across a page range you choose.

What happens to pages I don’t mark? They’re copied through to the exported PDF completely unchanged — original selectable text, original file size, nothing rebuilt.

Can I undo a mistake after exporting? No — undo only works before you export, on boxes you’ve drawn in this session. Once you download the redacted PDF, treat it as final; your original file is never modified, so you can always start over from it if needed.

Redacting a scanned document instead? Convert it with the PDF ↔ image tool first if you need to work with individual pages as images, or merge several redacted PDFs back together afterward with the PDF merge tool.