See what text is still hiding under the black boxes.
Many PDF redactions don't actually work the way you think. A black rectangle in Preview or Acrobat Reader is just a visual overlay—the text underneath stays in the PDF and can be recovered. This tool scans your PDF in seconds to verify whether your redactions are real or if sensitive text is still hiding underneath. Upload a file or try one of the demo PDFs to see what's at risk.
Upload a PDF to scan for leaked text under redactions
A black rectangle drawn over text is a visual overlay, not a removal. The underlying text remains in the PDF's text layer and is recoverable by any tool that reads it.
Acrobat's built-in redaction tool sometimes applies only as an annotation rather than flattening into the PDF. When exported or printed, the markup layer may not render, exposing the text beneath.
Hiding text in Word or applying background colors does not delete the text from the PDF's content stream. Word exports keep the text layer intact, making the content recoverable.
True redaction requires either flattening the PDF (rasterizing all content into an image), using a dedicated redaction tool that removes text from the content stream, or using a tool that explicitly re-encodes the PDF without the sensitive content.