How to Remove Annotations from a PDF
Updated July 13, 2026
A PDF that’s been through a few rounds of review comes back covered in highlights, sticky notes, and ink scribbles — useful during editing, clutter once you need a clean copy to send out or archive.
Steps
- Open Remove Annotations and drop your PDF.
- Click Remove annotations.
- Download the cleaned PDF.
What gets removed, and what doesn’t
The tool strips review markup and navigation annotations — highlights, sticky notes, ink, text/stamp annotations, and links — from every page in one pass. Form fields are a special kind of annotation, so a blanket strip would break any interactive form on the page; this tool leaves form-field widgets alone, so a fillable form still works after cleanup. If you want to lock a filled-in form so its values can’t be changed, that’s a job for Flatten PDF instead.
If there’s nothing to remove
A PDF with no removable annotations is returned unchanged, and you’ll be told so rather than left guessing.
Notes
Cleanup happens entirely in your browser, so even a confidential document with sensitive markup never leaves your device. Once it’s clean, Edit Metadata is worth a look too if you’re preparing the file for distribution.