Redact PDF
Automatically finds SSNs, credit-card numbers, emails, phone numbers, and your own keywords — then blacks them out permanently. The redacted copy has no text layer to un-hide. All in your browser.
Redact PDF Tool
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Findings
True Redaction — Not a Black Box You Can Copy-Paste Under
The redaction horror story is always the same: someone draws a black rectangle over text, the text remains underneath, and a journalist or opposing counsel simply selects and copies it. This tool does redaction properly. First it detects sensitive data by pattern — Social Security numbers, credit-card numbers (validated with the Luhn checksum so random digits don't false-positive), email addresses, phone numbers, IBANs, plus any names or keywords you add. You review every finding. Then it redacts by rasterization: each page is re-rendered as an image with black boxes burned in, and a new PDF is built from those images. The original text layer is gone entirely — there is nothing to select, copy, or un-hide.
Detection and redaction both run in your browser, which matters precisely because the documents you redact are the ones you least want uploaded. Everything runs on your device via open-source browser libraries — your files are never uploaded. You can verify it yourself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Unlike drawing rectangles over text, this tool rebuilds the PDF from page images with the black boxes burned into the pixels. The output has no text layer at all — copy-paste, search, and text-extraction tools recover nothing.
The redacted copy behaves like a high-quality scan: it is no longer searchable or selectable (that is the point), and the file size may change. Keep your original for reference and share only the redacted copy.
SSNs (123-45-6789), credit/debit card numbers (Luhn-validated), email addresses, phone numbers, and IBANs — plus any custom words or names you type in, such as a client name or project codename.
Scans have no text layer to search. Run the file through our OCR tool first, or use the custom-keyword field after OCR. You can also verify any PDF's hidden text with copy-paste before trusting a redaction from any tool.