Add Hyperlinks

Free

Drag a rectangle on page 1, type a URL — repeat to add multiple clickable regions. pdf-lib /Link annotations, every viewer respects them.

What you'll get: a PDF with clickable hyperlink regions on page 1 — drag a rectangle, type a URL, repeat. Standard /Link annotations every PDF viewer honors. For another use, try Strip Hyperlinks.

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Stays in your browser

Free tools run fully on-device — nothing is uploaded to a server.

No watermarks

Clean output, no branding, no daily limits.

Free forever

No signup required. Seriously.

Why people add hyperlinks to PDFs

Static PDFs become navigable when you add clickable regions. A logo links to the company site, a footer links to a privacy policy, a product code links to its catalog page. The pattern matches what HTML does for the web — except viewers honor it without any extra plugin.

Branding + footer links

Add a clickable logo or company-site URL on a finalized one-pager so recipients can jump to your site.

Product / SKU pages

On a printable catalog or invoice, link each line item to its product page or detail view.

Citation refs

Add a clickable DOI / arXiv link in a research summary so readers can verify the source.

Policy + terms links

Add ‘Privacy Policy’ / ‘Terms’ links to a contract footer so legal references are one click away.

Cross-doc references

Link to other PDFs hosted on your team’s shared drive — recipients click through instead of hunting for the file.

Marketing + RSVP

Link an ‘RSVP’ button on an event flyer to a Google Form. Link a ‘Reserve’ button on a sales sheet to your booking page.

How Add Hyperlinks works

Three steps, no signup, no uploads.

STEP 1
Drop your PDF
Up to 100 MB. PDFium renders page 1 at 1.5× as the editor canvas.
STEP 2
Drag a rectangle
Click and drag on the page to define the clickable region. The rectangle gets an accent border + dashed outline (because it doesn’t have a URL yet).
STEP 3
Type the URL + Save
URL field appears in the config panel. Type the destination (https://… or mailto:…). Click Save link to commit. The rect turns solid blue. Drag again to add another.
STEP 4
Apply & download
All saved links are stamped as /Link annotations on page 1 via pdf-lib. Every viewer (Acrobat, Apple Preview, Chrome, Firefox) shows them as clickable.

What makes pdfcraft ai different

Same engine Chrome uses
PDFium is Google's PDF engine — the one that powers Chrome's built-in PDF viewer. We compile it to WebAssembly so it runs in your browser at near-native speed.
100% local processing
Most free PDF tools upload your file to a server, process it, and stream the result back. We don't. Your file lives in your browser tab and never touches our infrastructure. Verifiable in your browser's Network panel.
No watermark, no signup, no daily limit
Convert 1 PDF or 1,000. We don't gate on volume because there's nothing to gate on — the engine runs on your machine.
Honest about limitations
When something the tool can't do (encrypted PDFs, cross-reference streams), we tell you clearly instead of failing silently. Same for partial results: sampled vs exact, embedded vs not.
Open standards, free engines
PDFium is BSD/Apache licensed (free for any use). We don't pay vendor license fees and pass that savings on to you (and to ourselves) as a free, ad-supported tool with no upgrade-to-pro pressure.

Frequently asked questions

Will the links work in every viewer?

Yes. /Link annotations with /URI actions are spec-compliant since PDF 1.0 (1993). Acrobat, Apple Preview, Chrome, Firefox, mobile readers — all respect them. Some terminal-style viewers (pdftotext output) don’t render the click area but the URL itself is preserved in the annotation dict.

Why is the rectangle invisible after save?

Standard hyperlink annotations use a ‘no border’ setting (Border [0 0 0]) so they don’t visually mark the page. The link is invisible until hovered. If you want a visible underline, run our Highlight PDF afterwards on the same region.

Does this support text-aware linking (auto-detect URLs in text)?

Not in v1. v1 = drag a region, type a URL. Auto-detecting existing URL strings in the text and making them clickable would need PDFium text-position math — useful future work.

Can I add links on every page?

v1 = page 1 only. Multi-page link addition needs page navigation in the editor. Workaround: extract the page → add link → merge back.

What URL schemes work?

https://, http://, mailto: are universally honored. file:// works in some viewers but is often blocked for security. Custom schemes (myapp://) work if the viewer supports the scheme.

Will the link survive saving / re-saving the PDF?

Yes. /Link annotations are first-class PDF objects, not page-content overlays. They persist through any standard re-save. Form-flattening tools (including our Flatten PDF Forms) don’t touch link annotations.

Is anything uploaded?

No. PDFium renders the preview locally; pdf-lib applies the annotations locally. The PDF never leaves your browser.

Need to remove links instead?

Strip Hyperlinks removes every clickable annotation from a PDF. Useful for print prep where active links are dead ink.

Try Strip Hyperlinks

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