Google Drive includes built-in OCR that runs automatically when you open a scanned PDF with Google Docs. It's free, requires no extra software, and works well enough for most common documents. There are limitations worth knowing about, but for straightforward scanned text it handles the job reliably.
How to Do It
Upload the scanned PDF to Google Drive. Once uploaded, right-click the file and choose Open with โ Google Docs. Drive runs OCR automatically during the conversion and opens the result as an editable Google Docs document. The original PDF remains in Drive unchanged โ Google creates a new Docs file alongside it.
The converted document contains the recognized text in the upper portion, followed by an image of each original page below. This dual-layer approach lets you see what Google recognized versus what the original page actually says โ useful for catching OCR errors by comparing the two side by side.
What It Does Well
For clean, high-contrast scans of standard printed text in common languages, Google Drive's OCR is accurate. A professionally printed document scanned at 200 DPI or higher typically converts with very few errors. It handles multiple languages and can often recognize mixed-language documents without any special configuration.
The output is immediately editable in Google Docs, which is convenient if you need to make changes to the text. From Docs you can also export back to PDF (File โ Download โ PDF Document) or to Word format if needed downstream.
Where It Falls Short
Google Drive's OCR doesn't preserve the original document layout. Tables come through as plain text, multi-column formatting gets linearized, and any complex formatting is lost. The recognized text is plain paragraphs โ visually, nothing like the source document.
For documents where you need the layout preserved โ a form you'll redistribute, a report that should keep its original design โ Google Drive OCR gives you the text content but you'd need to manually reapply formatting. For documents where you just need the text content to search, edit, or extract data from, the lack of formatting doesn't matter.
Low-quality scans, faded text, handwriting, and unusual fonts produce noticeably more errors. CJK characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) have generally improved in Google's OCR engine but still lag behind Latin script accuracy for complex text.
When a Dedicated OCR Tool Is Better
If you need OCR output that stays in PDF format โ a searchable PDF rather than a Google Doc โ Google Drive isn't the right tool. It converts to a Docs file, not back to a PDF with a text layer. For that, WukongPDF's OCR PDF tool processes the scan and returns a PDF where the text is selectable and searchable while the visual appearance of the original document is preserved. This is generally what people mean when they say they want to "OCR a PDF" โ they want the same document back, just with recognizable text rather than an image.
For bulk OCR of many documents, or for documents where accuracy on difficult content matters, dedicated OCR software like ABBYY FineReader produces better results than Google Drive, at the cost of being a paid product. For everyday free OCR of clean scanned documents, Google Drive handles it well enough that most people don't need anything else.