A link you copied is two hundred characters long and only forty of them are the page. The rest is who sent you, which advert you clicked and which newsletter it came from. That part comes off here; the part that makes the page work stays on.
The easy way to build a tool like this is to throw away everything after the question mark in a link. It is also the wrong way, because half the web keeps real information there. On a shop it is which colour of the shirt you chose. On YouTube it is where the video starts. In a long list it is which page you were on.
So nothing is removed for sitting in that part of the link. Something is removed because its name appears on a list of names known to belong to advertising, and anything not on that list is left exactly as it was. The list is long and it is specific, and a name that could go either way is either tied to the one site that uses it or left off altogether.
On YouTube, si records who shared the video with you. On another site the same three letters might mean the size, the section, or nothing in particular. t on X is a tracking code; t on YouTube is the point the video starts at, and removing it drops you back at the beginning of a two-hour talk.
A name on its own is not enough to go on, so every rule that could go either way is tied to the site it came from. Amazon's ref, eBay's _trksid and Google's ved only ever come off links to those sites. Anywhere else they are left alone, because there they might be doing a job.
A link that reaches you through Outlook does not point at the page any more. It points at safelinks.protection.outlook.com, with the real address packed up inside it, which is why the tail of it is a long mess of percent signs and numbers. Facebook, Google, Slack and half a dozen others each have their own version of the same thing.
Those come apart here. The real address is lifted out, put back into readable form, and then cleaned like any other link. Forwarded twice, it comes apart twice. What you get back is the page somebody meant to send you in the first place.
Not with the settings it arrives with, and that is by design rather than luck. Nothing is removed for sitting in the part of the link after the question mark. Something is removed because its name is on a list of names known to belong to advertising, and everything else comes through untouched - which is why the bit that picks the colour, the page number or the point a video starts at all survive. The one group that could break a link, ref and source and the like, is switched off until you ask for it.
Untick it. Everything taken out is listed under the two boxes with a tick beside it, and unticking one puts it straight back into the result. Nothing disappears silently, which is the part most cleaners get wrong: they hand you a shorter link and leave you to work out what is missing.
Campaign tags such as every utm_ and the Matomo and HubSpot equivalents; click identifiers including fbclid, gclid, gbraid, srsltid, msclkid, ttclid and yclid; newsletter tags such as mc_eid, mkt_tok and _hsenc; and a per-site list for the places that invented their own, like Amazon's ref=, YouTube's si, eBay's _trksid and Google's ved. Somewhere north of two hundred names in total.
Because these names mean whatever the site that invented them decided they mean. On YouTube si records who sent you the video. On your site the same three letters might be the size, the section or the supplier. Every rule that could go either way is tied to the site it came from for exactly this reason, so it never applies anywhere else.
A link forwarded through Outlook, Facebook or Google does not point at the page any more. It points at their server, with the real address packed up inside it - that is why the tail of it is a long mess of percent signs and numbers. Unwrapping lifts that address back out, puts it into readable form and then cleans it like any other link. Forwarded twice, it comes apart twice.
Yes. Paste as many links as you like, one per line, and each is cleaned on its own. It is the usual way this job turns up: a column out of a spreadsheet, a set of links out of an email, or a redirect map that arrived with the tracking still attached.
No. The whole thing runs in your browser, in JavaScript, and nothing is posted to this server or to anybody else. That matters more here than on most pages, because the parameters you are removing are often the ones carrying your name, your email address or which advert you clicked.
No, and it is worth being clear about the difference. A shortener replaces your link with a new one pointing at somebody else's server, which can stop working, and which usually adds tracking of its own. This removes characters from the link you already have and changes nothing else: the address still points where it always did, directly.
It is if you are the one who put them there. These tags exist so an analytics tool can say where a visit came from, and removing them from a link in your own campaign loses that. The tool is for the other end: a link somebody sent you, that you now want to share, publish or put in a document without carrying their tracking, or your own identifier, along with it.