How to Copy Text From a Website That Won't Let You (Mac)

Need to copy text from a website that won't let you? You find the paragraph you need, drag to select it, and nothing happens. Or right-click is disabled, or the copied text pastes as "Copying is not allowed". Sites do this to discourage scraping, but it also blocks normal readers who just want to quote a recipe, save a reference or translate a passage.

Here's what works on a Mac, quickest first.

How sites block copying (and why it matters)

There are three techniques, and each needs a different fix:

Technique	What you notice	Beaten by
CSS user-select: none	Text won't highlight	Reader view, print to PDF, page source, OCR
JavaScript blocking copy or right-click	Highlights, but copy or right-click does nothing	Reader view, disabling JavaScript, OCR
Text drawn as an image or on canvas	It's not really text at all	Only OCR

Method 1: Safari Reader view (fastest)

Press ⇧⌘R in Safari, or click the Reader icon in the address bar. Safari re-renders the article in its own clean layout, which usually drops the site's selection blocking. Select and copy normally.

It only works on article-style pages. Shops, dashboards and web apps don't get a Reader button.

Method 2: Print → Save as PDF

Press ⌘P, choose Save as PDF, and open the file in Preview. The text usually comes across selectable, even when the page blocked it. Some sites hide content when printing, so check the PDF is complete.

Method 3: view the source

If the text is in the page's HTML, View Source (⌥⌘U in Safari with the Develop menu enabled, or right-click > View Page Source in Chrome) shows it in plain form. Use ⌘F to find your paragraph. This is fiddly on modern sites, where content is often loaded by scripts.

Method 4: read the screen (works on everything)

If you can see it, OCR can read it, whatever the site does. That includes text rendered as images or on canvas, which nothing else handles.

We built a test page with selection disabled and a "Copying is disabled" banner:

Then we read it with Apple's on-device text recognition. The output matched the page word for word, including "93°C" and the en dash in "30–45 seconds":

How to Brew Pour-Over Coffee
Start with 15 grams of medium-fine coffee for every 250 ml of water. Heat the water to 93°C, just
off the boil, and rinse the paper filter to remove any papery taste.

The free way to do this is a screenshot (⌘⇧4), then open it in Preview and select the text with Live Text. The one-step way is Screenshot Text: press ⌘⇧7, drag over the paragraph in any browser, and paste. Recognition happens on your Mac, so the page content isn't uploaded anywhere.

Use Normal mode for web text. Optimize for code is only for code. In our test it took this same recipe and turned each sentence into a code comment.

Which method should you use?

• One article in Safari: Reader view.
• Long page you want to keep: Print to PDF.
• Text inside images, canvas or a web app: OCR.
• Short passages, often, in any browser: a screen OCR shortcut.

If the page is a PDF rather than HTML, see can't copy text from a PDF on Mac. For how the built-in route works, see does Mac have OCR?

Whichever you use, quote responsibly. Copying a passage to read, translate or cite is normal. Lifting a whole site's content isn't.

For text in images rather than on a page, see how to extract text from a screenshot on Mac.