How to Auto-Redact a Name or Number Everywhere in a PDF Online
Find every occurrence of a name, account number, email or phrase across a PDF and cover each match with a black box — case-insensitive by default, with a preview and confirm step before anything is drawn.
What auto-redaction actually does
Auto-Redact PDF searches a document's text for a word, phrase or regex and draws a solid black box over every match. The boxes keep text from being seen, selected, copied or searched in a normal PDF viewer, which is exactly what you want when a client name or invoice number appears ten times across a long contract.
Be clear about the boundary: the boxes sit on top of the text. The covered words still exist below them in the file, and document metadata such as author, title and creation date is not touched. This is a visual cover, not a forensic erasure. If content must be truly destroyed rather than just hidden, the Redact PDF tool and a proper review workflow are the right choice — and verify the output either way.
What the search can and can't see
Matching reads the PDF's text layer, so it can only find words the file actually stores as text. Scanned pages keep words as images and can't be searched — run PDF OCR first and auto-redact the recognized copy. Some fonts draw characters as outlines rather than text, and a few PDF exports split a phrase across several text runs; those cases can be missed. Check the red preview before confirming.
Search is case-insensitive by default: 'john smith' finds 'John Smith' too. Turn on Case-sensitive for exact case, Whole word only to ignore partial hits like '48' inside '48102', or switch to regex mode for patterns such as account-number shape.
Search, review, then confirm
Open a PDF up to 100 MB and 200 pages, type your term, and click Find matches. Pages with hits are shown with a red highlight over each match plus a per-page count, so you can flip through and see exactly what would be covered before anything is drawn.
A match anywhere inside a text chunk covers the whole chunk with one padded box. That is deliberately conservative — coverage is slightly larger than the match — but it means a box can cover a few nearby words too. When the match list looks right, click the confirm button and download a new file named <source>-redacted.pdf. Your original is never modified.
Budget, privacy, and the verify step
Each run is capped at 100 MB, 200 pages and 100 matches, and the confirm step stops you from blacking out the wrong page by accident. If more than 100 matches exist, only the first 100 are listed — narrow your term or regex, and the tool says so before you confirm.
Everything runs in your browser; the PDF and the terms you search for never leave your device. Keep your original untouched, share only the redacted copy, and before you send it, open the downloaded file and confirm the covered text can't be selected or searched.
Try it free — Auto-Redact PDF
Search a PDF for a word or phrase — like a name, account number, or email — and automatically black out every occurrence.
Open Auto-Redact PDF