This first part of the June 2026 Common Crawl PDFs analysis reveals several long-term characteristics of PDF usage on the public web:
Most PDFs remain relatively small, short documents.
Encryption is uncommon and generally does not prevent document access.
Accessibility text extraction is enabled in most encrypted documents, although a significant minority still disables it.
PDF 1.7 continues to dominate document production.
Proprietary extensions remain common, particularly in annotation workflows.
Link annotations dominate all other annotation types combined.
The analysis provides a large-scale view of how PDF technology is used across the public web and establishes a foundation for future reports on PDF in general with focus on Tagged PDF, PDF/UA adoption, and accessibility trends.
The final dataset contains:
20,578,394 PDF documents
approximately 38 TB of source data
basic metadata:
page count
file size
creation and modification dates
PDF version (including Version entry in the document catalog)
producer and creator
encryption information and permissions
annotations
presence of interactive forms
presence of optional content layers
presence of digital signatures
image only (scanned) pages
Tagged PDF information:
stats on the use of structure element types
logical structure tree validation against ISO 32005
Comments
This first part of the June 2026 Common Crawl PDFs analysis reveals several long-term characteristics of PDF usage on the public web:
Most PDFs remain relatively small, short documents. Encryption is uncommon and generally does not prevent document access. Accessibility text extraction is enabled in most encrypted documents, although a significant minority still disables it. PDF 1.7 continues to dominate document production. Proprietary extensions remain common, particularly in annotation workflows. Link annotations dominate all other annotation types combined.
The post says:
That limit became 5 MB in March 2025.
The analysis provides a large-scale view of how PDF technology is used across the public web and establishes a foundation for future reports on PDF in general with focus on Tagged PDF, PDF/UA adoption, and accessibility trends.
The final dataset contains:
20,578,394 PDF documents approximately 38 TB of source data
What methodology did you use?
For each PDF we extracted:
basic metadata: page count file size creation and modification dates PDF version (including Version entry in the document catalog) producer and creator encryption information and permissions annotations presence of interactive forms presence of optional content layers presence of digital signatures image only (scanned) pages Tagged PDF information: stats on the use of structure element types logical structure tree validation against ISO 32005