How to Share a Link to a Particular Phrase on a Webpage

Share a Link That Points to Exactly What You Want People to Read

Have you ever wanted to send someone a link that jumps straight to a specific sentence or phrase on a webpage, rather than leaving them to scroll endlessly to find what you're referring to? You're not alone. Whether you're a researcher sharing a key finding, a teacher pointing students to a passage, or just someone trying to make a point in a conversation, the ability to link directly to highlighted text is a genuinely useful capability — and most people have no idea it exists.

Modern browsers have quietly introduced a feature that makes this possible, and once you know how to use it, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. This guide walks you through everything you need to know about sharing a link to a particular phrase on any webpage.

What Is a Text Fragment Link?

A text fragment link — sometimes called a scroll-to-text fragment — is a special type of URL that tells the browser to not only navigate to a specific page but also scroll to and visually highlight a particular piece of text on that page. When the person receiving the link clicks it, their browser jumps directly to the relevant passage and highlights it, usually in yellow, so it's impossible to miss.

This feature is part of an open web standard supported by several major browsers. It works by appending a special syntax to the end of a URL that includes the phrase you want to highlight. The result is a shareable, functional link that removes all guesswork for your reader.

Text fragment links are especially valuable for long articles, academic papers, documentation pages, news stories, and any content where a specific line or paragraph carries the weight of your message.

Which Browsers Support Text Fragment Links?

Support for text fragment links is solid across the most widely used desktop browsers. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge support the feature fully, both for generating and following these links. Opera and Brave, which are built on the same Chromium engine, also handle text fragment links without any issues.

Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari have more limited or conditional support, meaning that users on those browsers may still land on the correct page but won't always see the highlighted text. That said, even when highlighting doesn't render, the link still takes the user to the right page, which is better than nothing. As browser support continues to evolve, it's reasonable to expect more consistent behavior across all platforms in the near future.

On mobile, Chrome for Android supports the feature reliably, while iOS browsers tend to have the same limitations as their desktop Safari counterpart.

How to Create a Link to a Specific Phrase Using Google Chrome

Google Chrome makes creating a text fragment link remarkably easy with a built-in right-click option. Here's how to do it step by step.

Open the webpage that contains the text you want to highlight and share.
Use your cursor to click and drag over the specific phrase or sentence you want to link to. Make sure you've selected only the text you intend to highlight.
Right-click on the selected text to open the context menu.
Look for the option that says Copy link to highlight and click it.
The special URL is now in your clipboard. Paste it anywhere — in an email, a chat message, a document, or on social media — and it will take anyone who clicks it directly to that highlighted phrase.

That's genuinely all there is to it. Chrome handles the URL construction for you behind the scenes, so you never have to think about the technical syntax involved.

How to Create a Text Fragment Link Manually

If you're using a browser that doesn't offer the right-click shortcut, or if you want a deeper understanding of how these links work, you can construct a text fragment URL manually. The format follows this pattern:

https://example.com/page#:~:text=your%20phrase%20here

After the page URL, you add #:~:text= followed by the phrase you want to target. Spaces in the phrase are replaced with %20 (the standard URL encoding for a space character). For example, if you want to highlight the phrase "scroll to text fragment," your URL addition would look like this: #:~:text=scroll%20to%20text%20fragment.

You can also define a range of text using a comma to separate the start and end of the passage: #:~:text=start%20of%20phrase,end%20of%20phrase. This is useful when you want to highlight a longer block without typing out the whole thing.

There are also tools and browser extensions available that automate this manual process, generating clean text fragment URLs with a single click regardless of which browser you prefer.

Practical Uses for Text Fragment Links

Understanding the feature is one thing — knowing when to use it is where the real value lies. Text fragment links are particularly well-suited to a wide variety of everyday situations.

Academic and research contexts: Point colleagues or students directly to a cited passage in a lengthy report or study without forcing them to search through pages of content.
Workplace communication: When referencing a specific clause in a policy document, a terms-of-service page, or a shared knowledge base, a text fragment link eliminates any ambiguity about what you're referring to.
Content creation and journalism: Link readers directly to a quote or statistic within a source article, making your references transparent and easy to verify.
Customer support: Help desk agents can share links that send customers directly to the relevant answer in a long FAQ page, reducing friction and improving the support experience.
Social sharing: When you want to share a specific insight from a long read on social media, a text fragment link focuses your audience's attention immediately rather than making them hunt through the article.

Privacy and Limitations to Be Aware Of

Like any web feature, text fragment links come with a few caveats worth knowing. First, the highlighted text is visible in the URL itself, which means anyone who sees the link can read the phrase before clicking it. In most cases this is perfectly fine, but it's worth keeping in mind if context sensitivity matters.

Second, text fragment links only work on publicly accessible web pages. If the page requires a login or is behind a paywall, the recipient will need their own access credentials — the link itself doesn't bypass any authentication.

Third, some websites deliberately disable text fragment highlighting using a special HTTP header called Document-Policy: force-load-at-top. This is uncommon, but it does mean a small number of sites won't respond to text fragment links in the expected way.

Start Using Text Fragment Links Today

The ability to share a link that highlights a specific phrase is one of those features that quietly makes digital communication more precise and more considerate of the reader's time. It removes ambiguity, adds context, and makes collaboration smoother across virtually every setting where links are exchanged.

If you use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, you can start using this feature right now with nothing more than a right-click. For other browsers, a simple manual edit to your URL or a lightweight browser extension gets the job done just as effectively. Either way, the next time you want to make sure someone reads exactly the right sentence on a page, you have everything you need to make it happen.