Find every occurrence of a word or phrase and black them out — works on text and scanned PDFs.
Redacting a few sensitive words by hand is easy; finding every instance of them in a fifty-page document is not. Search & Redact solves that by scanning a PDF for the exact words or phrases you name and blacking out each occurrence automatically. A single missed name or number can turn a careful cleanup into a liability, which is why a systematic search matters. It is a Premium feature, and like every tool here it runs entirely in your browser.
Manual redaction has a well-known failure mode: people miss occurrences. A social security number might appear in a header on page three and in the body on page forty. Names show up in signatures, footers, and appendixes. Skipping even one instance can leak exactly the information you meant to hide.
Search-based redaction closes that gap by checking the whole document systematically. Every matching word or phrase gets a black rectangle drawn over it, so the same term is handled consistently no matter where it appears.
You type the terms you want to hide as a comma-separated list, and the tool looks for each one on every page. Text-based PDFs are matched directly from their content. Scanned PDFs have no text to search, so the tool runs OCR, recognizes the words in the images, and redacts the matches. In both cases you get a count of how many occurrences were covered before the file downloads.
The usual targets are personally identifiable information: names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and account numbers. Beyond that, documents are redacted for many other reasons, including internal memos that mention a product before it launches, settlement amounts in legal filings, and personnel details in employment records.
The search approach is a good match for any of these because it works on exact matches. A term that appears ten times gets redacted ten times, with no need to page through the document and compare what you remember with what is actually there.
A useful habit is to treat redaction as a two-pass job. Run the first pass with the obvious terms, then go through the result once more with abbreviations and partial matches in mind. Because each run reports its match count, you can see exactly how many occurrences were covered each time.
Pro tip
Enter terms exactly as they are likely to appear, and include common variations if you want to be thorough. Searching for a last name, for example, catches more if you also add the initials and the full name. You can always run the tool a second time with a longer list if you spot anything you missed.
Search & Redact is available to Premium subscribers. The feature is worth it for anyone who regularly sanitizes legal documents, removes personally identifiable information, or prepares files for public release. Because processing happens in the browser, confidential material stays off remote servers even while it is being worked on, and the redacted result is the only file you ever take away with you.
Unlike the manual redaction tool, this searches your entire PDF for specific words or phrases and redacts every occurrence automatically. Type "confidential, secret, internal" and every instance of those words across all pages will be permanently blacked out.
Works on both text-based and scanned PDFs. Scanned documents are processed through OCR (optical character recognition) to detect and redact matching text.
Ideal for: legal document sanitization, removing PII (personally identifiable information), declassifying documents, preparing files for public release, and compliance with data privacy regulations.