Share a link with quoted text in Messages [Pro Tip]

The best way to send someone a great article you just read online is to share a link with quoted text: It highlights whatever you found interesting in the post and encourages them to click the link.

Usually, you would have to copy the quote and paste it with the link, but there’s a hidden way to do it in Safari. It’ll properly format the rich link with the quoted text highlighted above.

If you want to quote a specific line from an article or a how-to (like this one), sending it with a pull quote is easier and looks nicer than copying the text you want and putting it in quotation marks as a separate text.

And it takes just a second! Here’s how it’s done.

Send a text message with a quote and a link

Rich links are a great way to get a preview of the content before you tap it. Messages will automatically turn a link at the beginning of a text into a rich link. Instead of seeing the plain URL, it expands to show the page title and featured image from the site.

All you have to do is select the text you want to quote. Drag the pins to precisely adjust the quoted text. Hit the Share button at the bottom of the screen. You can tap on a contact name or tap the Messages icon to type one in.

You’ll see a preview of the message before you hit send.

From some testing, you can quote about 32 – 36 words before it’s cut off. Unfortunately there’s no ellipsis to indicate the text continues, it ends abruptly when it reaches the character limit.

Sharing a link with quoted text only works using Messages. You can send a rich link as a green-bubble SMS message and it’ll look all neat and nicely formatted on your end, but it may not appear that way on the other end. Testing with a Google Voice number, it appears as a plain link.

This doesn’t work in Notes, Mail, nor third-party apps like Snapchat or Discord.

But in Messages, it’s a great way to highlight important information and cite the source all in one.

More Messages tips and tricks: