How to Copy Text From a Website (Even When Copying Is Blocked)

To copy text from a website, highlight it with your mouse, press Ctrl + C (or Cmd + C on a Mac), then paste it with Ctrl + V. To paste it without the website's fonts and links, use Ctrl + Shift + V instead. If the site blocks selection or right-click, reader mode or a text extraction tool will usually get the text out.

Below are the steps for each situation: normal pages, pages that block copying, phones, text inside images, and copying an entire page at once.

How to copy text from a website (the basics)

Select the text. Click at the start of the text and drag to the end. Double-click selects one word, and triple-click selects a whole paragraph.
Copy it. Press Ctrl + C on Windows and Linux, or Cmd + C on Mac. You can also right-click the selection and choose Copy.
Paste it. Click where you want the text and press Ctrl + V or Cmd + V.

To copy all the text on a page, press Ctrl + A (or Cmd + A) to select everything, then copy. Expect menus, buttons, and footer links to come along with it.

Paste without formatting

When you paste website text into Word, Google Docs, or an email, it often keeps the site's fonts, colors, and links. Paste as plain text instead:

Where	Shortcut
Windows and Linux (most apps and browsers)	`Ctrl` + `Shift` + `V`
Mac (most apps)	`Cmd` + `Shift` + `Option` + `V`
Mac (Google Docs, Chrome)	`Cmd` + `Shift` + `V`
Microsoft Word	Right-click, then Keep Text Only under Paste Options

If a shortcut doesn't work, paste into a plain text editor first (Notepad on Windows, or TextEdit in plain text mode on Mac), then copy it again from there. That strips every bit of formatting.

Why can't I copy text from a website?

Some sites stop you from copying on purpose. They use CSS (user-select: none) to block selection, or JavaScript to disable right-click and the copy shortcut. Other times the "text" is really an image, or the content sits inside a PDF viewer or canvas element.

Here's how to get around each one, from easiest to most technical. Use these for content you have the right to use, such as quoting a passage, saving a recipe, or reading with a screen reader. Copying text doesn't give you permission to republish it.

1. Turn on reader mode

Reader mode rebuilds the page with its own clean styling, so the site's copy blocks usually stop working.

Safari: click the Reader icon in the address bar.
Firefox: click the Reader View icon in the address bar.
Edge: click the Immersive Reader icon, or press F9.
Chrome: right-click the page and choose Open in reading mode.

Then select and copy as normal.

2. Print or save as PDF

Press Ctrl + P (or Cmd + P) and choose Save as PDF. Open the PDF and copy from there. Copy restrictions on the web page don't carry over to the PDF.

3. View the page source

Press Ctrl + U (or Cmd + Option + U on Mac in Chrome) to open the page's HTML source. Use Ctrl + F to find the sentence you want and copy it. The text will be mixed in with HTML tags, so this works best for short passages. It also won't help when the text is loaded later by JavaScript, because the source only shows the page's starting HTML.

4. Disable JavaScript for the site

If JavaScript is what blocks right-click, turning it off restores normal behavior.

Chrome: click the icon to the left of the address bar, open Site settings, and set JavaScript to Don't allow. Reload the page.
Firefox: type about:config in the address bar, search for javascript.enabled, and set it to false. Remember to turn it back on afterward.

The catch: many modern sites need JavaScript to show their content at all, so the page may come up blank.

5. Use developer tools

Right-click the text (or press F12) and choose Inspect. The Elements panel highlights the HTML for that text. Right-click the element and choose Copy > Copy element, or double-click the text in the panel to select it. In the Styles pane, you can also untick user-select: none to make the page selectable again.

How to copy text from a website on your phone

iPhone and iPad: press and hold a word until it's highlighted, drag the handles to cover the text you want, and tap Copy. If the site blocks selection, open Safari's page menu and tap Show Reader first.

Android: press and hold a word, drag the blue handles, and tap Copy. For blocked pages, try the browser's reading mode or a browser with built-in reader view.

How to copy text from an image or screenshot

If the text is part of an image, you can't select it in the browser. Use OCR (optical character recognition) to read it:

iPhone, iPad, and Mac (Live Text): in Photos, Safari, or the Camera app, press and hold the text in an image (or click and drag on a Mac) to select it, then copy.
Google Lens: in Chrome on desktop, right-click an image and choose Search with Google Lens, then switch to the Text tab to select and copy. On Android, Google Lens is built into the camera and Google app.
Windows: the Snipping Tool's Text actions button can pull text out of a screenshot.

OCR is usually accurate on clear, printed text and less reliable on stylized fonts or low-resolution images, so proofread the result.

How to copy all the text from a website at once

Selecting a long page by hand is slow, and Ctrl + A grabs a lot of junk. A URL to text converter turns the whole page into clean text in one step.

With URLtoText:

Paste the page URL into the box.
Pick plain text, Markdown, or HTML output.
Click Convert, then Copy.

Because it fetches the page itself, it works on many sites that block right-click and selection. It also has options for harder pages:

Render JavaScript for pages that load their content in the browser.
Extract with a CSS selector, like article or .post-content, to copy only the main content and skip menus and footers.
End of article cutoff text, so extraction stops at a phrase like "Related posts".

The free version needs no signup. If you need to do this for many pages or inside an app, the URLtoText API returns the same output as JSON. For a deeper comparison of manual and automated options, see how to extract text from a website.

Which method should you use?

Situation	Best method
Short passage on a normal page	Select, copy, paste without formatting
Site blocks selection or right-click	Reader mode, then print to PDF
Reader mode doesn't work	Developer tools, or a URL to text converter
Text is inside an image	Live Text, Google Lens, or Snipping Tool
Entire page, or many pages	URLtoText or its API