How to Highlight Text on a Web Page

A web page is not paper. When you drag a marker across a screen nothing happens, and when you select text the blue selection disappears the moment you click elsewhere. So "highlighting" on the web really means one of four different things: marking text for yourself while you read, saving a highlight so you can find it later, sharing a highlight with someone else, or teaching a page to open already highlighted. Pick the goal first and the method follows.

Method 1: select the text and share a link (nothing to install)

Every current browser understands a special kind of link called a text fragment. It looks like a normal address with #:~:text= and a few words added to the end. When someone opens it, the browser scrolls to those words and paints them yellow or purple. This is the closest thing the web has to a built-in highlighter, and it works on pages you do not own.

1. 1

   Select the passage

   Drag across the sentence you want to point at. Keep it under about 300 characters; long selections are more likely to fail if the page changes.

2. 2

   Copy a link to it

   In Chrome and Edge, right-click the selection and choose Copy link to highlight. In other browsers, paste the page address and the sentence into the highlight link generator and copy the result.

3. 3

   Send the link

   Paste it into a message, a document or a lesson plan. The recipient's browser scrolls to the passage and highlights it. If their browser does not support text fragments, the link still opens the page at the top.

The highlight lives in the link, not on a server. Nobody stored a copy of the page, nobody can see who opened it, and the link keeps working as long as the page keeps the same words. That is the trade: no account and no stored copy, but if the author edits the sentence the highlight stops matching and the browser simply shows the page.

Method 2: use a highlighter bookmarklet

A bookmarklet is a bookmark that runs a small script on the page you are looking at instead of opening a new page. The Awesome Highlighter bookmarklet paints your current selection yellow, builds the text-fragment link for it, and offers the link to copy. It runs entirely inside your browser, works in every desktop browser, and needs no permissions. Drag it to your bookmarks bar once; after that highlighting any page is one click.

Bookmarklets are a good fit if you switch between many browsers or work on computers where you cannot install extensions, such as school and library machines. Their limit is memory: the yellow disappears when you reload, because nothing is saved. Keep the link instead.

Method 3: install a highlighter extension

If you want highlights that survive a reload, appear again when you return to a page a month later, and collect in one place, you need a browser extension or a web annotation service. These store your highlights, usually in an account, and re-apply them when the page loads. Some also sync to a phone app, export to note-taking tools, or let a class annotate the same article together.

The cost is trust and time. An extension that re-applies highlights must be able to read every page you visit, so pick one with a clear privacy policy and a business model you understand. Our comparison of highlighter extensions explains what to look for and names the ones that pass.

Method 4: use the reader mode built into your browser

Safari, Edge and Firefox each have a reading view that strips a page down to its text. Safari on iPhone, iPad and Mac lets you select in that view and use the share sheet; Edge's Immersive Reader has a highlight tool with four colours that works while the page is open; Firefox Reader View keeps your selection stable while you copy. None of these save highlights permanently on their own, but they make selecting on a cluttered page far easier, and they pair well with methods 1 and 2.

Which method should you use?

Tips that make highlights hold up

• Highlight complete sentences or clauses. Fragments that start mid-word confuse readers and break more often in links.
• Prefer one highlight per idea. A page that is half yellow says nothing.
• For sharing, copy the page's canonical address (the one in the address bar after the page finishes loading), not a tracking link from a newsletter.
• On very long pages, the browser may take a second to scroll to the fragment. That is normal.
• If a site loads its text after the page appears (comment threads, some news apps), text fragments may miss. Use the bookmarklet from inside the loaded page instead.

This overview is the front door to our highlighting guides for every device. When the text you need is in a document rather than a page, marking up a PDF file works differently; on a small screen, see highlighting on iPhone and Android; and if your selections keep starting a character early, selecting text precisely with the keyboard fixes it.