Sometimes when you share a web page link with someone, you just want to draw their attention to a particular passage or sentence to make your point, rather than having them read the entire article.
In 2020, Google added a feature called Scroll to Text Fragment (STTF) to its Chrome browser to help you achieve this. Allows URLs to link directly to any visible text on the page. You may have seen this in Google Search, where clicking on a link in the returned results will take you to a highlighted passage of text further down the page.
Google later added this 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 the highlighted link in Safari
Apple added full support for text snippet links in Safari 18, and this 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 link to, then right-click (Ctrl-click) and select Copy link with highlighting from the drop-down menu.
“Copy link to highlight” option.
This will generate a special URL that contains a hash (#) and a “text” element followed by a few words that surround the selected text. All you have to do is share the link with someone and when they click on it, they will be sent directly to the section of the website with the specific passage highlighted as shown below.
The shared link as seen by the recipient
That’s all. The Copy link to highlight option is also available in Safari on iPhone and iPad, although we found it to be buggy and inconsistent in iOS 26.3. Hopefully Apple will fix this soon. At least on the Mac, it makes it easier for you to direct the recipient of the link to the content they should actually focus on.
Note that the appearance of highlighted text may vary depending on whether the author of the page has edited it to look a certain way. Linking text fragments also does not work in PDF. As of July 2025, the Copy Link to Highlight feature was also introduced in Firefox.