How do I search Google for PDF files?

Last reviewed: October 7, 2026 · Markdown version

Type your words followed by filetype:pdf, with no space after the colon. Google's own example is photoelectric effect paper filetype:pdf. The same filter is a menu choice on Google's Advanced Search page, under "File type", if you would rather not remember the operator. It works the same in the Google app or a phone browser, because it is part of the query rather than a setting.

The operator, in Google's words

Google Search Help lists it among its operators: "To find documents of a particular file type: Enter filetype: in front of the file type." It also gives the rule that trips people up: "Do not put spaces between the operator and your search term. A search for [ site:nytimes.com ] will work, but [ site: nytimes.com ] won't" (Refine Google searches, Google Search Help, read 7 October 2026).

Google's documentation for site owners adds one detail about what the filter matches. Its example, filetype:rtf galway, "will search for RTF files and URLs ending in .rtf whose content contains the term" galway. The same page lists "Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)" among the file types Google indexes (File types indexable by Google, Google Search Central, read 7 October 2026). In other words, the words you type are looked for inside the documents, not only in their titles.

Narrowing it down

The other operators on Google's page combine with it (Refine Google searches, Google Search Help, read 7 October 2026). Each line below uses Google's syntax; the example searches are ours.

An exact phrase: put it "inside quotes", as in "tenancy agreement template" filetype:pdf.
One website: "Enter site: in front of a site or domain", as in site:example.gov annual report filetype:pdf.
Leave a word out: "Enter - in front of a word that you want to leave out".
By date: before: and after: take a year or a date, and Google says they can be combined for a range.

For a product manual, our suggestion is the model number in quotes plus filetype:pdf; finding manuals online has the rest of that method. For academic papers, Google Scholar has its own operators, covered on searching for publications.

Without typing the operator: Advanced Search

Google's Advanced Search page has a "File type" menu under "Then narrow your results by", and "Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf)" is one of its options (Google Advanced Search, read 7 October 2026). To reach it from a results page, Google's help says to click Tools at the bottom of the search box, "Or, tap Search Tools on mobile", and then choose Advanced Search (the Refine Google searches page above).

When a PDF you know exists does not show up

A scanned PDF is a picture of each page. Google's indexable-file-types page lists PDF as an encoded format that needs "a specific parser to extract the human-readable text", and lists common image formats separately, but it does not say whether Google reads text that only exists as an image inside a PDF (the File types indexable by Google page above). So if your words are not matching a document you are sure is online, our suggestion is to search for its title, or for the page that links to it, instead of a phrase from its body.

Once you have found it

Finding a PDF on the web and finding a word in PDFs you have already saved are different searches. If you save a copy of a result, where a downloaded PDF ends up tells you where to look for it. To search inside the ones already on your phone, see searching PDFs on iPhone or searching PDFs on Android.