Is your PDF actually redacted?
Most redaction tools only cover text with a black box. The data stays in the file. This free tool checks whether yours actually removed it.
Runs entirely in your browser — your file never leaves your device
Drop your PDF below to check
We'll scan for redaction annotations and check whether the text underneath is still extractable.
Drag and drop a PDF here, or
PDF files up to 50 MB
Your file never leaves your browser
This tool makes assumptions about document structure to detect redactions and should not be relied upon as a definitive check. It does not work on scanned or image-based documents.
Understanding your results
Text extractable (red)
The redaction failed. The original text is still in the PDF and can be recovered. The document should not be shared or disclosed in this state. You need to re-redact it using a tool that performs full-depth redaction, which removes the text from the file rather than covering it.
Possible redaction (amber)
The tool found a dark filled area with no extractable text. This is likely a proper redaction, but could also be a graphic element. Review these manually to confirm they cover what you intended.
Content removed (green)
The annotation has no extractable text underneath. This is the expected result for a properly redacted document.
No annotations found
The PDF does not contain any redaction annotations. This could mean the document was never redacted, or it was redacted using a full-depth tool (like Redactr) that removes data entirely rather than applying annotations. If you expected redactions, verify the document was processed correctly.
Why most PDF redactions are not real
When you draw a black box over text in a PDF, it looks redacted. But in most tools, the original text is still in the file. The black box is just an annotation layer — a visual overlay that hides the text on screen but leaves it fully intact underneath.
This means anyone can recover the "redacted" data by selecting the text, copying and pasting, using a PDF text extraction tool, or simply removing the annotation layer. This is not a theoretical risk — it has led to real data breaches in legal proceedings, government disclosures, and medical record sharing.
Annotation vs. full-depth redaction
There are two fundamentally different approaches to PDF redaction:
Annotation-based redaction draws shapes (usually black rectangles) over sensitive text. The shapes are a separate layer in the PDF. The original text remains in the file and can be extracted. Most built-in PDF editors and many "redaction" tools work this way.
Full-depth redaction removes the text from the PDF at the byte level. The data is deleted from the file — not covered, not hidden, not moved to another layer. After full-depth redaction, the text cannot be recovered because it no longer exists. This is what Redactr does.
The verification tool above helps you identify which approach was used on your document. If it finds extractable text beneath redaction annotations, the document was redacted with an annotation-based tool and is not safe to share.
Questions about PDF redaction verification
It scans your PDF for redaction annotations (black boxes, highlight overlays, and similar markup) and checks whether the original text underneath is still present in the file. If text can be extracted from beneath a redaction annotation, the redaction is cosmetic — the data is hidden visually but not actually removed.
No. The entire analysis runs in your browser using JavaScript. Your PDF is never sent to a server, never uploaded, and never leaves your device. You can verify this by disconnecting from the internet before using the tool — it will still work.
It means the original text still exists in the PDF file beneath the redaction overlay. Anyone with a PDF reader, a text extraction tool, or even copy-paste can recover it. This is the most common redaction failure — the document looks redacted on screen but the data is fully intact.
It means the tool found a dark filled area with no extractable text underneath. This could be a properly applied redaction, or it could be a graphic element that happens to look like one. Review these manually to confirm.
Not necessarily. This tool checks for redaction annotations specifically. If your PDF was redacted using a full-depth redaction tool like Redactr, the sensitive data was removed from the file entirely — there are no annotations to check because the data is simply gone. This tool is most useful for verifying PDFs redacted with annotation-based tools.
No. This tool analyses the text layer of a PDF. Scanned documents that are essentially images do not have an extractable text layer, so the tool cannot determine whether text has been removed or was never there. For scanned documents, you would need OCR-based analysis.
You need to re-redact the document using a tool that performs full-depth redaction — one that removes the text from the file rather than covering it with an overlay. Redactr does this via API: you send the document, specify what to remove, and get back a clean PDF with the data permanently deleted.
Need redactions that actually work?
Redactr removes sensitive data from PDFs at the byte level. No traces left behind.