Link Tracker Detector

What tracking parameters do

When you click a link in an email, social post, or ad, the URL you land on often contains a trail of extra parameters appended after the ?. They look like this:

`` example.com/article?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=oct2025&fbclid=IwAR1xyz ``

These parameters do nothing for the destination page. They exist to tell the destination *who* sent you and *which campaign* you came from. Some are essential to the publisher (knowing if their newsletter is working). Some are pure surveillance (linking your visit back to your Facebook profile).

The most common categories you'll see:

• utm_* — Urchin Tracking Module. Created by Google Analytics. Tells the destination which campaign, source, and medium referred you. Mostly used for legitimate marketing measurement, but it also persists across sessions if you share the URL.
• fbclid — Facebook Click Identifier. Generated when you click a link from Facebook. Lets Facebook (and the destination, if they have a Facebook Pixel) tie your post-click behavior back to your FB profile.
• gclid, gbraid, wbraid — Google Ads click identifiers. Similar role for Google Ads attribution.
• msclkid — Microsoft Ads / Bing equivalent.
• mc_eid, _hsenc — Mailchimp / HubSpot identifiers, often unique per recipient. These are the ones that reveal *which specific person* clicked from a marketing email — even before you log in.

Why you'd want to strip them

A few practical reasons:

1. Sharing a link cleanly. If you share a URL with someone and forget to strip the tracking, you've now exposed your own attribution info to a third party. Their click counts as if it came from you.
2. Avoiding tracker chains. Some sites read these parameters and store them in cookies for the entire session, propagating them across pages. Removing them keeps the session cleaner.
3. Slightly shorter URLs. Mostly cosmetic, but pasting example.com/article reads better than example.com/article?utm_source=foo&utm_medium=bar&utm_campaign=baz.

Why you might NOT want to strip them

Sometimes the tracking is genuinely load-bearing:

• Session tokens — some sites encode authentication state in query params. Removing them logs you out. (Hopefully sites don't do this in 2025, but legacy code exists.)
• Email-delivered receipt URLs — order confirmations occasionally use parameters as access tokens.
• Affiliate codes you actually want to honor — if a creator asked you to use their link, the tracking parameter is the credit. Removing it deprives them.

That's why we show both versions side by side. Decide case by case.

Where the ruleset comes from

The tracking rules used here are a curated subset of the ClearURLs project, an open ruleset maintained by the privacy community. We bundle the most common ~70 parameters that account for the vast majority of tracking in everyday links. The full ClearURLs ruleset has thousands of site-specific rules; if you need exhaustive coverage, install their browser extension.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. The URL you paste is never sent to any server.