ChatGPT Bold Text Removal — Stripping Markdown Asterisks Cleanly
How to remove ChatGPT's bold text markdown asterisks cleanly — including when to strip them and when to convert to proper formatting.
ChatGPT uses double asterisks to indicate bold text in its markdown output. When you copy and paste into apps that do not render markdown, these asterisks appear literally: **like this**. This is one of the most common and visible ChatGPT formatting problems. Here is how to handle it cleanly.
Why ChatGPT Uses Bold Formatting
ChatGPT applies bold formatting to emphasise key terms, introduce list items, highlight important concepts, and structure responses for easier scanning. The model learned these formatting patterns from the web content it was trained on, where bold text is commonly used for emphasis and structure. In the ChatGPT app, this bold formatting renders correctly. The problem only arises when text is copied to apps that display the raw asterisks instead.
How Bold Markdown Breaks in Different Apps
In email clients, double asterisks appear literally around words, making the text look like it was written with markdown by someone who forgot to render it. In word processors, the asterisks import as literal characters and must be removed manually. In social media posts, asterisks appear as plain text (though WhatsApp actually renders single asterisks as bold, creating potential confusion with ChatGPT's double-asterisk convention). In CMS platforms, asterisks appear literally in the visual editor but may render as bold if the CMS has a markdown renderer.
Removing Bold Markers Manually
Use Find and Replace to remove double asterisks. Search for ** (two asterisks) and replace with nothing. This cleanly removes all bold markers from the text. Be careful: if the text also contains single asterisks for italic formatting, remove the double asterisks first, then handle single asterisks separately. Removing them in the wrong order can leave stray asterisks that look wrong.
Find and Replace for Asterisks
In most text editors, a simple literal search for ** works perfectly. In some editors that support regex, asterisks are special characters that need escaping. In regex mode, search for the escaped version of double asterisks. If using a text cleaner tool, asterisk removal is typically handled automatically as part of the markdown stripping process. For comprehensive cleaning, see our markdown formatting guide.
Keeping Useful Bold Formatting While Removing the Rest
Sometimes you want to preserve bold formatting but in a format your destination understands. For HTML destinations (WordPress, email HTML, web pages), convert double asterisks to HTML strong tags instead of removing them entirely. This preserves the emphasis that ChatGPT intended while using a format that renders correctly. For plain-text destinations, remove all asterisks completely and rely on other methods (capitalisation, position, phrasing) to convey emphasis.
Bold Text in HTML vs Markdown
If your destination is a web page or HTML email, converting ChatGPT's markdown bold to HTML bold is often the best approach. Replace **text** with text wrapped in strong tags. Online markdown-to-HTML converters do this automatically. This preserves the intended formatting while ensuring it displays correctly in any browser. For destinations that do not support any formatting (plain text, SMS, basic CMS), strip the asterisks entirely and accept that emphasis will be lost. For more formatting solutions, see our formatting issues article and our workflow guide.