Google Chrome built-in PDF viewer
Chrome's PDF viewer, which OCRs scanned PDFs automatically on your device.
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
View
Browse all view toolsviewing PDFs in the Chrome PDF viewer on a computer, where the Chrome Help article documents opening a PDF in Chrome and opening it in a new tab, managing the page display with Zoom in and Zoom out, Fit to page and Fit to width, and Rotate for the page orientation, navigating with a setting that turns on navigating pages with a text cursor, caret browsing toggled with F7, tab focus on the PDF, and arrow key navigation by character or word with Shift to select, and a setting at chrome://settings/content/pdfDocuments that chooses whether PDFs open in Chrome or download to the device
OCR
Browse all ocr toolsconverting scanned PDFs of physical documents to searchable and selectable text in the Chrome PDF viewer, where the Chrome Help article states that scanned PDFs accessed through the viewer are automatically converted using Optical Character Recognition, that after the conversion the text can be highlighted, searched, copied, pasted and found within the document, and that the conversion is completed on the device without sending any data to Google or third parties
Where your files are processed
Mixed - depends on version and feature
The vendor's own documentation separates them. On the device: Chrome on Windows, macOS and Linux, Chrome on Android. On their servers: Saving to Drive, and the Android edit action. A single answer for the whole product would be wrong for one of them.
Mixed and worth reading carefully. Google states the scanned-PDF conversion is completed on your device without sending data to Google or third parties, so both rendering and OCR are local.
But the optional save-to-Drive flow uploads the open PDF, and on Android the edit action opens the file in Google Drive - those paths are cloud processing. A PDF opened from a website is also fetched over the network from its host.
What it does
Chrome renders PDFs in a normal browser tab with no separate application: zoom, fit to page or width, rotate, text search and keyboard navigation with caret browsing. You can draw with a pen or highlighter in chosen colours, erase annotations and draw a signature, then save the file with or without those changes.
Google documents automatic on-device OCR that turns a scanned PDF into searchable, selectable text.
Best for
Anyone who simply needs to read a PDF, search it, or lift text out of a scanned document without installing anything - which is most people, most of the time.
Worth knowing
Annotation stops at drawing, highlighting and a hand-drawn signature. There is no redaction, no page management, no compression and no format conversion, and on Android the edit action hands the file to Google Drive.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Web · Windows · macOS · Linux · Android
- Website
- support.google.com
- Requires an account
- No
- Watermark on the free tier
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- No
- Data residency
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- Not verified
- Self-hostable
- Not verified
- Licence
- Not verified
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- None
- Last availability check
- Responded in 491 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish
The vendor’s own site was read on 22 September 2026 and contains no mention of redaction, sanitisation, blackout or whiteout. Absence from a vendor’s own material is not proof that a feature does not exist - it may be undocumented, or on a page the reading did not reach - but for a NEGATIVE claim it is the strongest evidence available, and it is weaker than a positive quote.
Recorded as such rather than presented as certainty.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
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“When you use the Chrome PDF viewer to access PDFs, scanned PDFs of physical documents are automatically converted to be searchable and selectable using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence is the first of the two that describe OCR in the viewer, and the second is the claim already recorded - that the conversion happens on the device without sending data. Recording them as separate entries was deliberate: this one is a capability statement and the other is a privacy statement, and a reader may care about one and not the other.
The page is Google's own help article for the desktop browser. No control was run, and the OCR behaviour has not been observed.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 30d4b6b86e362a0e2079c6afc7b2d8c589fddbf86edab2e28b9f396294f5626e
How we checked
Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16215622 re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-google-com-chrome-answer-16215622-d4df04b5.txt.
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“The conversion is completed on your device without sending any data to Google or third parties.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 22 September 2026
Confirmed verbatim: the sentence appears unaltered at the end of the paragraph describing OCR in the Chrome PDF viewer. The claim's scope is narrower than it may read, and the page is clear about it: this is about the OCR conversion of scanned PDFs - "scanned PDFs of physical documents are automatically converted to be searchable and selectable using Optical Character Recognition" - and not about the viewer's handling of documents in general, nor about Chrome's other document features.
The page is the desktop help article and the steps that follow say "On your computer, open a PDF in Chrome", so it is a statement about the desktop browser. Worth recording that this is the claim in this batch our own instrument could actually settle: Chrome is installed here, and a network capture across an OCR conversion would turn this reading into an observation.
Nothing of the sort has been done.
Standing: Re-read and matched byte for byte
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 30d4b6b86e362a0e2079c6afc7b2d8c589fddbf86edab2e28b9f396294f5626e
How we checked
Re-verified verbatim on 2026-09-22: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16215622 re-rendered in headless Chrome with scripts/render-page.mjs and the claim's wording found in the rendered text. Originally verified on 2026-09-21. sourceHash is the SHA-256 of the re-rendered text, held as rv-support-google-com-chrome-answer-16215622-d4df04b5.txt.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.