CleanURL — Paul DE TEMMERMAN

CleanURL removes tracking parameters and share identifiers from the links you open and the links you copy.

A link from a share button, a newsletter or an ad usually carries more than the address of the page: campaign tags, ad click IDs, and the share identifiers that video, music and social apps add. None of it is needed to open the page.

WHAT IT REMOVES

• Over 900 tracking parameters in total.
• More than 450 removed on every website: campaign tags (utm_* and similar), ad click identifiers (gclid, gbraid, wbraid, dclid, fbclid, msclkid, yclid and more), and the tags email marketing and analytics tools add. Wildcards catch new variants of the common families.
• More than 450 are share and tracking identifiers specific to over 75 popular websites - video, music, social, shopping, news, travel and search - on their regional domains too.
• Some sites give every share its own randomly named identifier, so no list of names can keep up. On those sites' post pages, CleanURL keeps only the parameters the page actually uses and removes the rest.
• Redirect links from more than 50 services, unwrapped to their destination when you copy them, so you share the page itself rather than a tracked detour.
• Affiliate tags are left alone by default - they pay whoever shared the link - with a switch if you want to remove them too, which also unwraps affiliate network links.
• Anything a site needs to work, such as sign-in and session parameters (code, state, token, redirect_uri) and ordinary ones (q, v, id, page), is never touched.

WHAT IT DOES

• Cleans links before they load, on the request itself, so tracking parameters never reach the site and never appear in your address bar or history.
• Cleans links when you copy them: share panel "Copy link" buttons, Ctrl+C over a selected link, a page's own copy button, or dragging a link.
• Skips the click tracking on search results and maps. Links there often lead through a tracking redirect first; clicking one now takes you straight to the site, without the redirect or the click beacon. This includes a map's "Website" button. Links of that kind found anywhere else are left alone, so the search engine's own warning about suspicious redirects still protects you.
• Adds "Copy clean link" to the right-click menu, for a link or for the page you are on.
• Cleans the clipboard on demand. One popup button rewrites a link you've already copied - covering links copied in another browser or app, or with Chrome's own "Copy link address", which an extension cannot intercept. Chrome asks for clipboard permission the first time, and it is read only when you press the button.

SETTINGS

Switch any cleaning pass off on its own, leave chosen sites alone with a one-click toggle, add your own parameters with * wildcards, or keep a parameter a site turns out to need.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Not an ad blocker or an anti-tracking suite. It does not block requests, scripts, cookies or fingerprinting, and it will not stop a site knowing you visited. It edits URLs, and that is all it does.

PRIVACY

No data is collected. No network requests of any kind, no server contacted, no analytics. The parameter list is a plain file inside the extension, not fetched or updated remotely. Only your settings and two counters are stored, and they stay on your device.

It asks for access to all sites because tracking parameters turn up on links to any domain, including small and personal ones, and a URL can only be rewritten before it loads if the extension has access to it.

CleanURL is open source under the MIT license.