Sometimes when you share a webpage link with someone, you just want to bring their attention to a specific passage or sentence to make your point, rather than have them read through the entire article.
In 2020, Google added a function to its Chrome browser called Scroll to Text Fragment (STTF) that helps you achieve this. It allows URLs to link directly to any visible text on a page. You may have seen it work in Google Search, where clicking on a link in your returned results takes you to a highlighted passage of text further down the page.
Google later added the feature to the Chromium codebase, so most other popular Chromium browsers like Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi also support it. Here’s how it works.
Copy Link With Highlight in Safari
Apple added full support for text fragment links in Safari 18, and the feature is available in Safari on macOS Sequoia and later. To use the feature, visit a web page and simply highlight the text you want to create a link to, then right-click (Ctrl-click) and choose Copy Link with Highlight from the dropdown menu.
The “Copy Link to Highlight” option
This will generate a special URL that includes a hash (#) symbol and “text” element, followed by a few words that bookend the selected text. All you need to do is share the link with someone, and when they click it they will be sent directly to that part of the webpage with the specific passage highlighted, as shown below.
The shared link as the recipient sees it
That’s all there is to it. The Copy Link to Highlight option is also available in Safari on iPhone and iPad, though we have found it to be buggy and inconsistent in iOS 26.3. Hopefully Apple can fix it soon. At least on Mac, it makes it easier for you to direct the recipient of the link to the content you actually want them to focus on.
Bear in mind that the look of highlighted text can differ depending on whether the page author has styled it to look a certain way. Also, text fragment linking does not work in PDFs. Since July 2025, Copy Link to Highlight has also been introduced in Firefox.
