Guide
Extracting links from text and removing tracking parameters
Copying links out of a document should be simple, but real text fights back. A sentence ends with a full stop right after the address, a link sits in brackets, Wikipedia addresses contain brackets of their own, and links shared from Facebook or received in Outlook are wrapped in redirect services and padded with tracking codes. This tool finds the links and gives you clean ones.
Finding every link
Addresses starting with http://, https://, ftp:// or www. are recognised anywhere in the text: in sentences, Markdown, HTML source, chat exports or CSV files. Turn on bare domains to also catch example.com/page written without www, for common endings such as .com, .org, .net, .io and country domains. Email addresses are left alone, so the domain of [email protected] is not reported as a link.
Punctuation and brackets
A full stop, comma, colon or closing quote at the end of a link almost always belongs to the sentence, so it is removed. Closing brackets are trickier: in “(see https://example.com/page)” the bracket ends the remark, while in a Wikipedia address like Comma_(disambiguation) it is part of the page name. The extractor keeps a closing bracket only when the link contains a matching opening one.
Removing tracking parameters
Marketing tools add parameters that only record where a click came from: utm_source and the other utm_ tags, Facebook’s fbclid, Google Ads’ gclid, Microsoft’s msclkid, Mailchimp’s mc_eid, HubSpot’s _hsenc, Instagram’s igshid and dozens more. They are removed, while parameters that change the page, such as id, page or q, are kept. The panel under the result lists which tracking parameters were found and how often, which is a quick audit of a newsletter or a shared document.
Unwrapping redirects
Some links do not lead to the page at all but to a redirect service that records the click first. Links copied from Facebook and Instagram go through l.facebook.com, search results through google.com/url, and links in Microsoft 365 email through Outlook Safe Links. With unwrapping on, the real destination is taken from the redirect link and cleaned like any other address. Unwrapping is done by reading the address itself; no website is contacted.
Sorting and filtering
Duplicates are merged after cleaning, so two copies of the same page with different tracking codes become one entry. Order the list as found, alphabetically or grouped by website, or keep only one website’s links with the filter. The website table shows how many links point to each site.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. Neither the text nor the links are sent anywhere, and cleaned links share less about you when you pass them on.
A worked example
A link shared from a newsletter often looks like https://example.com/blog/launch?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&id=42. After cleaning it is https://example.com/blog/launch?id=42: the two utm_ tags are gone, the id that selects the article stays. A link copied from Facebook such as l.facebook.com/l.php?u=… is first unwrapped to the address in its u parameter and then cleaned, so the fbclid code inside it disappears as well.
Related tools
Collect addresses from the same text with Extract Email Addresses, get the text out of HTML with Strip HTML Tags, or encode a link for use in another URL with the URL Encoder.
Checked against the current version of the Extract URLs and Clean Links on .