If you save a URL to Apple Reminders — via the Share Sheet or Siri — it goes into the reminder’s URL field. This sounds fine until you try to do anything useful with it.

The Problem

The URL field in Apple Reminders is not accessible through any API. Apple doesn’t expose it through AppleScript, Shortcuts actions, EventKit (Swift/Objective-C), or any other interface. You can write to it, but nothing can read it back.

This means:

  • You can’t copy URLs out of reminders programmatically
  • You can’t move reminders with URLs to other apps and keep the link
  • You can’t build any automation that reads the URL
  • CLI tools like remindctl can’t access it

The URL is there. You can see it. You can tap it. But it’s a black hole for automation.

The Workaround

I made a simple Shortcut called Save URL to Reminders that saves the URL into the reminder’s body text instead of the URL field. The body text is accessible to scripts and other apps.

The shortcut does one thing: takes a URL from the Share Sheet and creates a reminder with the URL as the body text. That’s it. No title extraction, no fancy formatting — just the URL where it can actually be read by other tools.

How It Works

  1. You share a URL from Safari (or any app) using the Share Sheet
  2. The shortcut creates a new reminder
  3. The URL goes into the body text, not the URL field

Download

Download the shortcut

Why This Matters

If you use Apple Reminders as a read-later list or bookmark inbox — and you use any kind of automation to process those reminders — the URL field is useless. Saving to the body text is the only way to make the data accessible.

Apple could fix this by exposing the URL field in their APIs. Until then, this shortcut works.