PDF Link Extractor — Find & Export Links from PDFs

Quickly locate every link inside any PDF — visible text, hidden annotations, and metadata — then export a clean CSV.

Stop hunting for links inside long PDFs. PDF Link Extractor reads the PDF text layer, annotation objects, and metadata to surface every URI, URL, HREF, and LINK. Export a deduplicated CSV for research, audits, migration, or QA.

Key features:

• Extract URLs, mailto:, and internal GoTo/Dest links (text layer + annotations + metadata)
• One-click CSV export (columns: page, href)
• Deduplication and metadata-noise filtering (hide common namespace noise)
• Batch/API options available for automated workflows (contact us)
• Privacy-minded: files processed securely and removed after completion (see privacy policy)

Why it matters:

• Save hours manually scanning documents for links
• Catch hidden or malformed links that ordinary copy/paste misses
• Feed clean link lists into spreadsheets, crawlers, or QA pipelines
• Useful for researchers, journalists, librarians, legal teams, product managers, and content auditors

How it works — 3 simple steps:

1. Upload your PDF (or drag-and-drop).
2. Review parsed links in the table — filter by page, domain, or type.
3. Export CSV or copy selected links to clipboard.

Typical outputs:

• CSV with all the links (easy to open in Excel).
• Web-based preview table view you can filter, sort, and search by domain

Tips for Extracting Links and URLS

Be okay with getting 90% of links. Manually do the remaining 10%. Aiming for perfection can be a waste of time. Here’s why: PDFs are just simply weird file formats. They are okay for displaying content to users visually, but they were never intended to be machine readable (which is what this tool tries to do). URLs can be split across multiple lines, have odd spaces inserted, and generally be a mess. The multiple algorithms in this tool try to clean up the mess, but it is often still a mess. Be okay with imperfection and move on to something more worth your time. Tell your boss I said so. 😉

When extracting URLs from PDFs or text, we need to match several core patterns: standard http:// and https:// links, bare domains like example.com, subdomains (news.example.org), paths and query strings (/page?id=123), email links (mailto:[email protected]), and sometimes protocol-relative forms (//example.com). We also need to handle punctuation at line breaks, wrapped URLs, or links embedded in surrounding text. These regex-style rules can capture the vast majority of cases because most URLs follow predictable schemes, but they can never guarantee 100% coverage—edge cases like malformed links, obscure protocols, or intentionally obfuscated text will always slip through.

FAQ:

Q: Will it find links hidden in annotations?

A: Yes. The extractor reads annotation objects and pulls URI targets from /A and /URI entries as well as internal /Dest references.

Q: Will it work on scanned PDFs (images)?

A: Scanned PDFs without a text layer require OCR first. Run OCR to add a text layer, then re-run the extractor.

Q: Can I export to CSV?

A: Yes — exports include href for each annotation.

Q: Will this tool extract email addresses?

A: Yes, “@mailto” addresses are included. For example, mailto:[email protected] will be included if it is well-formatted.

Q: Are my files secure?

A: Yes. Files never leave your computer for this version of the app. Processing all happens in your browser.