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.
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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.
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That limit became 5 MB in March 2025.