What auto-redaction sees
The redaction engines in this category are pattern matchers with a light OCR pass. Emails, phone numbers, and long numeric strings that look like cards or account IDs are the reliable catches. On the test workflow, every tool with auto-redaction picked up the shipping email and the phone number without help.
What it misses
- Names embedded in page titles or breadcrumbs.
- Customer IDs that do not match a known pattern.
- PII drawn inside SVG charts, which the OCR pass rarely covers.
- Text captured inside a screenshot the tool did not take, for example a pasted image.
Why the weight is 12%
SOPs get shared. The moment a doc leaves the workspace, redaction is the difference between a training asset and a leak. Twelve percent puts it in the top four criteria without letting it dominate. Tools that ship with auto-redaction on by default score higher than tools that make you opt in per capture.
The review-before-share rule
The best redaction UI in the category still misses things. Every published SOP on our test workflow needed at least one manual redaction that the auto-pass had skipped. If an SOP is going outside the workspace, a human should look at every screenshot before the link is shared.