Strip Hyperlinks

Free

Remove every clickable hyperlink from a PDF. Print prep, compliance, and accidental-tap-proofing. Other annotations preserved.

What you'll get: a PDF with every clickable hyperlink removed — print-ready, compliance-friendly. Other annotations (highlights, comments, form fields) preserved. For another use, try Extract Links.

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Got several PDFs to process? Apply strip-links to many files at once and download a zip.Batch process →

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 strip hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are great in screens, problematic on paper, and explicitly forbidden in some compliance regimes. Removing them is the single most common annotation-cleanup task before sharing a PDF outside its original context.

Print prep

Hyperlinks are decorative ink on paper — they consume blue ink, they create visual clutter, and they’re unclickable. Strip before sending to press.

Archive compliance

Some retention policies require static documents — no live URLs that could rot, redirect, or expose internal infrastructure. Strip before depositing into long-term archive.

External sharing

Internal docs sometimes contain URLs to systems behind your VPN. Strip them before forwarding externally so recipients don’t hit broken links.

Touch-screen reading

Reading PDFs on phones / tablets — accidental taps on links are jarring. Strip for a smoother reading experience.

Academic distribution

Some journals and submission portals reject PDFs with active URLs. Strip before upload.

Pipeline normalization

When ingesting PDFs into a content pipeline (RAG, search, LLM context), live URLs sometimes confuse downstream tooling. Strip first to get clean text.

How Strip Hyperlinks works

Three steps, no signup, no uploads.

STEP 1
Drop your PDF
Up to 100 MB. Files stay in your browser.
STEP 2
Click Remove all links
We walk every page’s /Annots array, identify entries with /Subtype = /Link, and drop them. Other annotations (highlights, comments, form widgets) stay.
STEP 3
Download
Output has the visible link text intact (if it was rendered as page content) but no clickable behavior. Save and share.

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 URL text still be visible?

Yes, if it was rendered as actual page content. Hyperlink annotations are an OVERLAY that makes a region clickable — the underlying text (e.g. ‘visit example.com’) is part of the page content stream and is preserved.

What about other annotations?

Highlights, comments, sticky notes, form fields, and signature widgets are ALL preserved. We touch only annotations whose /Subtype is /Link.

Does this remove URLs that aren’t hyperlinks?

No. URLs that exist only as text (someone typed ‘https://...’) without being made into clickable links are left alone — there’s no annotation to remove.

Is anything uploaded?

No. pdf-lib runs in your browser.

Will internal cross-references (bookmarks pointing within the PDF) be removed?

No. Internal navigation goes through bookmarks (the outline tree), not /Link annotations. Bookmarks are preserved.

Want to extract links instead?

Extract Links from PDF lists every hyperlink with page references and CSV/JSON export. Useful for inventorying URLs before stripping them.

Try Extract Links

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