Workflows & Productivity | Published Oct 13, 2026 | 6 min read

How to Copy a Link to Highlighted Text in Chrome and Edge

To copy a link to highlighted text, select the words on the page, right-click them and choose Copy link to highlight. Chrome and Microsoft Edge both have the option, and Firefox has it from version 145. The link goes to your clipboard; when someone opens it, the browser scrolls straight to that passage and highlights it. It works by adding a text fragment, #:~:text=, to the end of the page address.

Copy a link to highlight in Chrome

Open the page in Chrome.
Click and drag to select the text you want to point to.
Right-click the selection.
Select Copy link to highlight.
Paste the link into an email, chat, document or note with Ctrl+V.

When you open such a link in Chrome, you can right-click the highlighted text and select Remove highlight to clear it. Google's help page notes that if you can't select Copy link to highlight, the feature may not work for the content you selected.

Copy a link to highlight in Microsoft Edge

Open the page in Edge and select the text.
Right-click the selection.
Choose Copy link to highlight. The link is copied to the clipboard.
Paste it into Teams, Outlook, a document, or a browser's address bar.

Microsoft describes the result the same way: the page opens at the selected text instead of the top, with that text shown in a contrasting colour. It works for anything from a single word to a full paragraph.

Firefox

Firefox has opened text-fragment links since version 131 (October 2024), and version 145 (November 2025) added Copy Link to Highlight to the right-click menu. Select text, right-click and choose it, as in Chrome.

What the link looks like

The browser adds a text directive after the page address. A link to the words "clipboard history" on a page looks like this:

https://example.com/article#:~:text=clipboard%20history

The parts, as MDN documents them:

Part	Meaning
`#:~:`	The fragment directive. Browsers strip it during loading, so the page's own scripts can't read it.
`text=`	The text to find and highlight. Spaces and special characters are percent-encoded, so a space becomes `%20`.
`textStart,textEnd`	Two strings separated by a comma highlight everything from the first to the second, which keeps long quotes short in the URL.
`prefix-,` and `,-suffix`	Text that must come just before or after the match, used to pick the right one when the same words appear more than once.
`&text=`	A second (or third) passage to highlight in the same link.

Matching ignores case. When you use the right-click option, the browser builds the directive for you, adding a start and end, prefix or suffix where it needs them to pin down your passage.

Writing one by hand

You can type a text fragment yourself: add #:~:text= and the words to the end of a page address. Encode spaces as %20. MDN notes the standard also requires a literal hyphen inside the text to be encoded (%2D), and commas and ampersands need encoding too (%2C and %26), because the syntax uses them as separators.

Which browsers open these links

Browser	Opens text-fragment links	Copy link to highlight in the right-click menu
Google Chrome	Yes	Yes
Microsoft Edge	Yes	Yes
Firefox	Version 131 and later	Version 145 and later

Safari opens text-fragment links from version 16.1 on Mac, iPhone and iPad, so links you send to Apple users show the highlight too.

A browser that doesn't understand text fragments ignores the #:~:text= part and opens the page at the top, so the link never fails outright. The reader just has to find the passage themselves.

Why a link to highlight doesn't work

The page text changed. If the words were edited or removed, there's no match, and the browser opens the top of the page. MDN suggests text fragments suit links you share now; for something that must work for years, link to a section heading's anchor if the page has one.
The text is inside an embedded frame. Text fragments only apply to the main page. Text inside an <iframe>, such as an embedded document or comment widget, isn't searched.
The same words appear elsewhere. The highlight may be on another instance, possibly off screen. Select a longer, more distinctive passage and copy the link again.
The option is greyed out or missing. Google says this means the feature may not work for that selection. Try a different passage of ordinary page text.
It was turned off. Website owners can opt out in Chromium browsers by sending the Document-Policy: force-load-at-top header, and administrators can disable the feature with Chrome's ScrollToTextFragmentEnabled enterprise policy.

Privacy: the quote travels with the link

The highlighted words are written into the URL in readable form. Anyone who sees the link, in a chat preview, a shared document or a browser history, can read the quoted text without opening it. Don't make highlight links to passages you wouldn't paste into the message directly.

On the network side, the fragment (everything after #) isn't sent to the website's server when the page is requested, and browsers hide the :~: directive from the page's scripts.

The link also keeps whatever was already in the address. If the page URL carries utm_ or other tracking parameters, strip them first; how to copy a link without tracking parameters shows how.

When to use it

Highlight links are handy for pointing a colleague to one line in a long policy, citing a sentence in research notes, or answering "where does it say that?" in a chat. For citations that need to survive edits to the page, pair the link with the quote itself and the date you read it; how to keep a quote together with its source URL and how to note page numbers and URLs when copying quotes cover that habit.

FAQ

Is there a keyboard shortcut for Copy link to highlight?

Neither Google nor Microsoft documents one. Use the right-click menu, or press the Menu key (or Shift+F10) after selecting text to open the context menu from the keyboard.

Does a link to highlight work in apps like Teams, Slack or Outlook?

The link itself is ordinary text, so you can paste it anywhere. Whether the highlight appears depends on the browser it opens in: Chrome, Edge, current Firefox and recent Safari show it.

How do I remove the highlight from a page I opened?

In Chrome, right-click the highlighted text and select Remove highlight. Reloading the page without the #:~:text= part also clears it.

Can I paste just the text without the link?

Yes. Copy the selection with Ctrl+C as usual. If it brings unwanted formatting, see how to copy plain text from a website.

Sources

Share or link to quotes and text in Chrome (Google Chrome Help) — Copy link to highlight, Remove highlight and when the option is unavailable.
Share quotes with Copy link to highlight (Microsoft Edge) — steps in Edge and how the link opens.
Text fragments (MDN) — syntax, percent-encoding, case-insensitive matching, iframes, no-match behaviour, Document-Policy opt-out.
Firefox 131.0 release notes (Mozilla) — support for opening text fragments.
Firefox 145.0 release notes (Mozilla) — Copy Link to Highlight in the context menu.
URL scroll-to-text fragment (Can I use) — browser versions that support opening text fragments, including Safari 16.1.
Text fragments (web.dev) — security design and the ScrollToTextFragmentEnabled policy.
RFC 3986: URI Generic Syntax (IETF) — the fragment is separated from the URI before it is dereferenced.

Written by Khushi Yadav · Author & Content Writer

Khushi Yadav writes Edge Drop's workflow and design guides and is a B.Tech Computer Science Engineering student. Khushi's posts are checked against Microsoft's documentation and the Edge Drop fact sheet.

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