Link Expander
See where a short link really goes — every hop, before you click.
- 100% success
Tool input
Overview
About this tool
Follows a redirect chain one hop at a time and shows each URL with its status code, so you can see where a shortened link ends up before opening it, or find the hop where your campaign parameters are being dropped.
Instructions
How to use it
Paste any link. Short links, tracked campaign URLs, affiliate links and ordinary pages that happen to redirect all work the same way.
Two different reasons to use this
- Before you click. A shortened link tells you nothing about where it goes, which is exactly why phishing uses them. Expanding it first is the cheapest safety check there is.
- When your own link misbehaves. A campaign URL that passes through a shortener, a redirector and a CMS canonical often loses its UTM parameters somewhere in the middle. The hop where they vanish is the hop to fix.
What it cannot see
This follows the redirects a server declares — 301, 302, 307 and friends. A page that redirects with JavaScript or a <meta refresh> tag will appear here as the final destination, because to any HTTP client that is what it is. A short link ending on a page that then bounces you somewhere else in the browser is worth treating as a red flag.
Questions
Frequently asked
Does expanding a link count as a click?
It registers as a request on the shortener, so a click counter will usually tick over. It does not load the destination page, run its scripts or accept its cookies.
Is a long redirect chain a problem?
On a link you control, yes. Each hop is a full round trip before anything renders, and mobile networks make that expensive. Three or more is worth collapsing. On a link somebody sent you, a long chain is more often a sign of deliberate obfuscation.
It says the host is unreachable.
Some services block automated requests outright, and a few only redirect for browsers they recognise. That is the shortener’s choice, not a fault in the chain — the answer in that case is that we cannot tell you, which is more useful than a guess.
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