Category: Tech Tip | Published: 2026-06-09
You send a colleague a link to a long policy document or a lengthy article. They come back ten minutes later asking where the relevant bit is. Sound familiar?
There is a Chrome feature that solves this almost entirely, and most people have never noticed it. It is called Copy link to highlight, and it lets you create a link that opens a web page scrolled directly to a specific sentence or paragraph, with that text highlighted in yellow on arrival. No digging, no Ctrl+F, no "it's about halfway down" in your message.
Here is how it works, what you can do with it beyond the basics, and where its limits are.
How to Use It
The steps are straightforward. Open the web page in Chrome on your computer, find the text you want to share, and highlight it with your mouse just as you would if you were copying it. Then right-click on the highlighted text. You should see an option in the menu that says Copy link to highlight. Click it, and the link is now in your clipboard ready to paste.
When the person you send it to opens that link in a compatible browser, the page loads scrolled to the relevant section, with your chosen text highlighted in yellow. They land exactly where you wanted them.
What the Link Actually Looks Like
If you are curious what Chrome is actually doing, paste the copied link somewhere and have a look. You will see something like:
https://example.com/page#:~:text=The%20specific%20text%20you%20highlighted
The #:~:text= part is a web standard called a text fragment. It is not something the page owner has to set up or enable. Chrome constructs it automatically from the text you selected and encodes it into the URL. When a compatible browser opens the link, it searches the page for that text, scrolls to it, and highlights it. The page does not need any special structure for this to work.
This is worth understanding because it means you can use this Chrome tip on almost any page, not just ones that have been set up with named sections and anchor links.
Highlighting a Longer Passage
If you want to direct someone to an entire paragraph rather than a single sentence, just select more text before right-clicking. Chrome will encode the start and end of your selection into the URL, and the browser will highlight everything in between on arrival.
This is particularly useful when you want to point someone to a complete clause in a contract, a full set of instructions in a technical guide, or a specific section of terms and conditions. Rather than highlighting a sentence that might not have enough context on its own, you can select the whole block that matters.
When the Same Text Appears More Than Once
Occasionally a word or phrase you want to link to appears multiple times on the same page. Chrome handles this with what the text fragment standard calls a prefix or suffix: extra surrounding words that tell the browser which instance of the text you mean.
In practice, Chrome does this automatically when it creates the link. If you have highlighted a phrase that appears several times, Chrome will include enough of the surrounding context in the URL to make the match unambiguous. You do not need to do anything different. Just select and right-click as normal.
Browser Compatibility
The one genuine limitation with this Chrome tip is that the recipient needs a compatible browser to see the highlight and land in the right place. Chrome itself works well, as does Microsoft Edge and Opera on desktop. Safari has partial support. Firefox has more limited compatibility.
If you are sending a link to colleagues who are likely to be using Chrome or Edge, which covers a large proportion of business users, this will almost always work as intended. If you are less sure about what browser the other person uses, it is worth adding a short note about where on the page to look, just in case the highlight does not appear for them.
When It Does Not Work
The feature is not guaranteed to work with every page or every piece of content. Some pages use dynamic content that loads after the page itself, which can confuse the text matching. Pages that are primarily made up of images, embedded documents, or heavily structured layouts may not behave as expected. If the Copy link to highlight option does not appear when you right-click, or the link you create does not work correctly when you test it, send the regular page URL and describe where on the page the relevant section sits.
Where This Chrome Tip Comes in Handy
The practical uses for this are broader than they might first appear. In a business context, useful situations include:
Sharing a specific clause in supplier terms or a service agreement with a colleague who needs to review it. Pointing a customer to the exact paragraph in your returns policy that answers their question. Sending a team member directly to the relevant step in a long set of technical instructions. Linking to the specific finding in a report or the particular line in guidance documentation that is relevant to a current decision.
Any situation where you would normally attach a screenshot of text, add a long explanation of where to look, or worry about the recipient missing the point entirely is a situation where this feature saves time and friction.
Getting More From Your Business Tools
Small features like this one sit inside tools your team already uses every day, and they add up. Knowing your way around the productivity features built into Chrome, Microsoft 365, and the other software your business runs on can make a noticeable difference to how efficiently your team communicates and collaborates.
If you want to make sure your team is getting the most from the technology they already have, take a look at our Services page to see how we help businesses get more out of their existing tools alongside everything else we manage for them.