About Affiliate Link Test

What it does

Paste any link. Affiliate Link Test shows you what it is (a merchant, an affiliate network, a short link or a wrapper), the affiliate ID it carries, every redirect it takes, and which parts of the link survive each redirect. When we can, we also show the product it lands on.

It is free. There is no sign-up and no account.

How it reads a link before visiting it

Many links carry their destination inside them. Google, Facebook and YouTube wrap outbound links this way, and many affiliate networks put the product link in a parameter. We read those straight from the link text. No request is made, so nobody's link records a click.

A link that hides its destination, such as amzn.to or bit.ly, has to be visited to see where it goes. The live check does this once:

• We look the link up in Google Web Risk, a list of known malware and phishing sites, before visiting. A listed link is never visited.
• We make one request per hop, follow up to 10 hops, and stop after 10 seconds.
• We stop at the merchant's first page. We do not browse the merchant's site.
• We reuse a result for an hour, so the same link is not visited again and again.

Visiting an affiliate link can count as a click in the affiliate's reports. That is why the first read never visits anything, and why results are reused.

What we keep

For each check we keep the link, the result, any tag or ID you typed, the page you used, your country, and a hash of your IP address. The check record holds the hash, not the address itself. Anything in a link that looks like an email address is masked before it is stored.

For each page view we keep the page, the site that sent you, any campaign labels on the address, and the browser details your browser sends (its user agent: browser, version, operating system and device type). If you have a Google Analytics cookie, we keep its ID too. We use these to count visits and to tell people from bots.

We also keep a hash of your IP address. When you visit, we look up the country, region, city and time zone your IP address points to and keep those, then drop the address itself. We do not look up visits we flag as bots.

Page views recorded before 14:21 UTC on 7 October 2026 still hold the full IP address. We have not deleted them.

We keep all of these records with no deletion date. We use them to see what people check and to fix links we read wrong.

If you type your own tag or ID on a merchant page, your browser remembers it so you only type it once. It is also sent with each check, so we can compare it with the link, and we keep it with that check.

If you join the link monitoring waitlist, we keep your email address, the link you checked, the page you used, the words you agreed to and the time. Monitoring is not built yet. We send nothing to that address until it is.

We use Google Analytics to count visits and which buttons are used.

Who makes it

Affiliate Link Test is made by Fresh Labs. We also make FreshStore, which builds affiliate stores with your own tag on every product link.