A link that jumps straight to one sentence on the page

You send a colleague a link to a long article with the note "it's somewhere in the second half." He opens the page, scrolls around for a bit, doesn't find it, and asks again. Yet Chrome and Edge can create a link that points not just to a page, but to a specific sentence on it — and highlights it in yellow for the recipient automatically. The feature is called "Copy link to highlight," and it's tucked inside a plain right-click.

How to do it

1. On a webpage, select the sentence or passage you want to reference with your mouse.
2. Right-click the selection and choose Copy link to highlight. It works in Chrome and Edge; the newest versions of Firefox are adding it too, and in the meantime the free Copy Link to Highlight extension covers it there.
3. The link is on your clipboard — paste it into an email, chat, or notes with a regular Ctrl+V. You can spot it by the #:~:text= fragment at the end of the address.
4. Whoever opens the link in a modern browser lands directly on the selected passage and sees it highlighted in yellow. In an older browser, it just opens the regular page from the top — nothing's lost, they just have to find the spot themselves.
5. If the option is missing from the menu, that particular page is blocking link creation — this happens occasionally, on sites with custom text-selection behavior.

A typical scenario

A manager is preparing materials for a decision and needs the team to read two paragraphs from a supplier's twenty-page terms of service. She used to write "see section 7, third paragraph" and half the team would end up reading the wrong thing. Now she selects exactly those two paragraphs, copies the link to the highlight, and pastes it into her message. Everyone who clicks sees exactly what they're supposed to — highlighted, no hunting required.

It works the same way for writing a paper: instead of bookmarking an entire source, a student saves links pointing directly to the cited sentences. When they return to the paper a month later, they don't have to re-locate what they actually cited from each source.

What you get out of it

The whole "I'll send the link — they can't find it — I explain where it is" loop disappears. Sharing an exact spot is just as fast as sharing the whole page, and the recipient saves minutes of scrolling. And your own notes and source round-ups start pointing to sentences instead of just articles.

Pro tip

The trick is useful for yourself too: drop a highlight link into your to-do app or calendar next to the task it relates to. When you get to the task, you won't have to reconstruct what you meant by that source — the page opens right at the spot you saved it for. Combined with find-on-page via Ctrl+F, you've got both directions covered: Ctrl+F for yourself, a highlight link for everyone else.