Re:PDF Trends 2026 Q2: Analysis of 20.6M PDFs from Common Crawl
by smartdev01 on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @09:24AM
(#49168640)
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.
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.