Since August, the visitor fingerprint behind unique clicks also included details of how the visitor's browser set up its secure connection. Browsers deliberately randomise some of those details every time they connect, so a visitor returning later in the day often looked like someone new. The effect was strongest in Chrome and on Android.

We've taken those details out. The fingerprint is now a one-way hash of the visitor's network address, browser and language setting. As before, there are no cookies, no JavaScript, and nothing is stored on the visitor's device.

Your full click history has been recalculated, so past and future numbers stay comparable. Expect unique counts to fall by around 10% on typical traffic, and by more on links with many returning Chrome and Android visitors. Unique clicks on ad traffic stay close to the click counts your ads manager reports, and total clicks are unchanged.

The New Link form now recognises a Stripe Payment Link and tells you how to set this up. Setup steps in Stripe integration.

Setup details in Custom domains.

Network and placement need no setup — ad platforms tag their own clicks, so Linkly can read them straight away. One campaign we looked at was sending 85% of its clicks from Meta's Audience Network: third-party apps and games rather than the Facebook and Instagram feeds.

Full details in Ad Analytics.

The advantage over linking to a file directly is that the short link can be changed and a file URL cannot. Click Replace, upload a new version, and every link and QR code already printed or sent opens the new document. Menus, price lists and timetables stop being a reprinting problem.

Files up to 10MB, included on every plan. Hosted PDFs are public to anyone with the address, which contains a long random string so it can't be guessed — for confidential documents, password-protect or expire the link.

Full instructions are in the PDF to link guide.

Open Linkly's directory page — or search for Linkly in Claude's Directory — and click Connect to Claude. Sign in with your Linkly account, choose a workspace, and you're done.

The listing is a public page, so you can open or share it without a Claude account — handy for showing your team (or your Claude admin) exactly which tools the connector provides before anyone connects it.

What you can do

Once connected, ask Claude to:

• Create links - "Create a short link for https://example.com/spring-sale called Spring Sale"
• View analytics - "Which countries are my clicks coming from this month?"
• Search and update links - "Find my links about the product launch and update the promo one"
• Manage domains and webhooks - "List my custom domains" or "Subscribe my webhook to click events"

Works on every plan

The Claude integration is available on all Linkly plans, including the free plan.

If your organisation has the directory switched off, or you use Claude Code, the manual setup still works — see the updated setup guide.

The location data is provided by Cloudflare, which resolves it at the edge as the redirect happens. No extra setup and nothing new to switch on.

Bot blocking is more precise as a result. On links with bot blocking switched on, automation is turned away while genuine visitors on their phones go straight through to your destination.

Detection is sharper on automation too. Headless browsers and tools like Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium are now recognised, along with crawlers that don't identify themselves — so your click figures rest on stronger signals in both directions.

Three smaller improvements. Skip social crawler tracking now recognises Facebook's crawler on custom domains as well. Each crawler is reported under one consistent name, however your link was served. And a click from a hosting network that we've identified as a real person is labelled Amazon.com (cloud), so it's clear why it appears in your human traffic.

The all-traffic counts stay available as their own columns, so you can show both side by side and see how much of a link's traffic is automated. Traffic reports have worked this way for a while — the links table now matches.

Sparklines follow the same rule. A link whose traffic is entirely automated now simply says "No recent clicks", rather than drawing a chart of crawler activity that looked like real interest.

Unique clicks are now counted per visitor, using a privacy-preserving fingerprint: a one-way hash of connection characteristics. No cookies, no JavaScript, and nothing stored on the visitor's device. In validation against live TikTok campaigns, unique clicks moved from roughly 30% below the ad platform's own click count to within a few percent of it.

The new counting applies across your full click history, so past campaigns are directly comparable. Expect unique counts to rise — most noticeably on mobile-heavy traffic. Total click counts are unchanged, and the Unique toggle works everywhere it did before: dashboards, reports, the click list, and CSV exports.

If you already send purchase events to Google Analytics 4, there's nothing to build — add the Linkly script to your site and we read the events you're already sending. No new events, no tagging work. Not on GA4? Report sales yourself in a line of JavaScript, or server-side from your backend.

Turn it on from any link's options, where the script is one click away. It's free on every plan, and currently in Beta — attribution depends on your site as well as ours, so it's worth verifying on your own setup before you rely on the numbers.

You'll see how many bots were filtered next to your click count (for example, "1,240 clicks · 380 bots filtered"), and a new Include bot traffic toggle reveals the full picture whenever you need it. The API is unchanged — reports there still include all traffic by default.

Arabic is our first right-to-left language, so the entire interface mirrors to match, with proper Arabic typography throughout.

Switch languages from the globe menu in the navigation bar, or jump straight to a localized page — for example /id/pricing or /tr/features/smart-links.

It works from the places where links usually break out to a limited in-app browser, like the link in bio on TikTok and Instagram — and it stays out of the way everywhere else, so your phone's built-in app handling keeps working normally. No SDK and no changes to the destination app required.

Popular apps like Amazon, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, and many more are recognised automatically, and you can set up any other app by hand.

Learn more about Open in app

Paid and enterprise customers are unaffected: existing l.linklyhq.com links keep working, though no new links can be created on the domain.

If you're on a free plan and still using l.linklyhq.com, we recommend migrating your links to linkly.link or connecting your own custom domain.

Restored links keep their original short URL and settings, so any QR codes or campaigns pointing at them start working again straight away. If a link's short URL has since been reused by a newer link, we'll skip that one and let you know.

Open Linkly in ChatGPT →

What you can do

Connect your workspace once, then just ask ChatGPT to:

• Shorten a URL — "Shorten https://example.com/my-long-page"
• Create a QR code — "Make a QR code for my website"
• Check analytics — "How many clicks did my last link get, and from which countries?"
• Manage links — "List my recent links" or "Update that link's destination"

It works on ChatGPT web and mobile, and signs in securely with your Linkly account via OAuth — the model never sees your credentials.

See the ChatGPT integration guide to get started.

PNG exports keep each link's saved colours, eye styles, and logo, so bulk output matches what you'd get downloading a single link. See creating QR codes for more.

There are new single-key actions on a link's details page: edit (e), duplicate (d), open the destination (o), copy the short link (c), or jump to its clicks (r). The dashboard shortcuts you already know — ⌘K to search and ⌘↵ to create a link — work just as before.

View the full list in the keyboard shortcuts reference.

It sits right alongside the Google and email options on the sign-up and login screens, so you can use whichever account you already have. Faster sign-in, one less password, now with Microsoft.

This makes it easy to keep your own systems in sync as your links change. See the webhooks documentation for the payload format.

Pick a platform, paste your ID, and save. When someone clicks the link, the pixel fires automatically before they're redirected — so you build retargeting audiences and analytics from every click, with no tracking scripts to copy and paste.

Linkly now supports ten platforms:

• Meta Pixel
• TikTok Pixel
• Google Analytics (GA4)
• Google Tag Manager
• LinkedIn Insight Tag
• X (Twitter) Pixel
• Pinterest Tag
• Microsoft Advertising (UET)
• Snap Pixel
• Reddit Pixel

Use any combination on the same link — they fire everywhere your Linkly links resolve, including custom domains.

See 'Retargeting & tracking pixels' for the full guide.

The biggest change is to data scanned — the limit has been raised by a large multiple across every plan, meaning you can run much larger queries and export far more data before hitting a limit.

These improvements apply automatically to your account — no action needed.

For full details, see the Analytics API documentation.

Explore it here: linklyhq.com/url-shortener-api-reference

Run in Postman →

npm install -g @linkly-link-shortener/cli
linkly auth login

Sign in with OAuth (browser) or an API key — credentials are saved locally so you only authenticate once. Add --json to any command for machine-readable output, or run linkly schema to print the full command tree for use with AI agents and scripts.

Read the full documentation →

Notifications include the link name, short URL, country, browser, and a link straight to the analytics dashboard. Debouncing applies as normal: at most one notification per link every 15 minutes, and bot clicks are excluded.

After installing, the setup page walks you through the next step: run /linkly notify in your chosen Slack channel to activate notifications. You can also type /linkly in Slack at any time to see all available commands.

Learn more about Slack click notifications.

What's in it

• /shorten <url> — create a branded short link in one command. Add <domain>/<slug> to pick the exact short URL.
• /clicks <domain/slug> — see total clicks and last-7-day stats, with a button into the full analytics dashboard.
• /qr <domain/slug> — get a scannable QR code rendered right in the channel.
• App Home — at-a-glance view of your connected Linkly workspace, default short-link domain, and dashboard shortcuts.

Three minimal bot scopes: commands, chat:write, im:write. No message-history or DM-history access.

Full details: Slack integration docs.

Existing customers are grandfathered. If you're already paying for Linkly, nothing changes — you keep your current plan and pricing for now.

We've also added new Zap templates for Google Sheets, Slack, RSS, WordPress and Mailchimp, covering the most-asked-for workflows: shortening URLs in bulk, getting Slack alerts on link clicks, and logging click data to Google Sheets.

See the integration →

We've also reworked the layout to be easier to scan: the destination, short link, and nickname sit together at the top, with targeting and tracking & analytics options grouped underneath. The QR code, recent clicks, and link preview now share a single side panel.

Open Linkly in ChatGPT →

What You Can Do

Once connected, just ask ChatGPT to:

• Shorten URLs - "Shorten this URL: example.com/my-long-page"
• Create QR codes - "Make a QR code for my website"
• Track clicks - "How many clicks did my last link get?"
• Manage links - "List my recent links"

Getting Started

Open go.linklyhq.com/chatgpt, sign in to your Linkly account when prompted, and start chatting.

This is now our recommended way to use Linkly with ChatGPT. See the full setup guide for more.

When Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or any other MCP-compatible client connects for the first time, a browser window opens asking you to sign in to Linkly and approve access. After that, your assistant stays connected with a workspace-scoped token, and the model itself never sees your credentials.

For Claude Desktop, the config is now just:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "linkly": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.linklyhq.com"]
    }
  }
}

See the updated setup guide for full instructions.

To enable push notifications, go to Account Settings and toggle on Browser Notifications. Once enabled, any link with click notifications turned on will also send push notifications to your device. Clicking a notification takes you directly to that link's traffic report.

Push notifications work in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. They use the same 15-minute debouncing as email notifications. Learn more about click notifications.

In the link editor, expand the TikTok Pixel section, enter your Pixel ID, and save. When someone clicks the link, the TikTok Pixel fires automatically before they're redirected to the destination.

This works alongside the existing Meta Pixel and Google Analytics integrations. You can use all of them on the same link.

See 'Add TikTok Pixel to a Link' for the full guide.

In the QR code editor, next to the Upload button in the Logo row, you'll see a small icon showing the favicon of your link's destination. Click it to instantly set it as the QR code logo — no need to download and re-upload the image yourself.

This makes it quick and easy to create branded QR codes that match the destination site.

When you paste a wa.me URL into the destination field (or just type wa.me), a form pops out with separate Phone number and Message fields, along with a live preview showing how the message will appear in WhatsApp.

This means you can:

• Edit the phone number and message without manually URL-encoding the text parameter
• See a live preview of the WhatsApp chat as you type
• Track every click with full Linkly analytics — location, device, referrer, and more

All existing Linkly features work with WhatsApp links, including custom domains, retargeting pixels, UTM tags, expiry dates, and A/B rotation.

See 'WhatsApp Link Generator' for the full guide.

This feature doesn't change the underlying image.

When adding a domain in the wizard, if your DNS provider supports Domain Connect, you'll see an Auto-Configure option. Click it, authorize the changes at your provider, and Linkly will set up the correct CNAME or A records for you — no manual DNS editing required.

Supported DNS providers include:

• Cloudflare
• GoDaddy
• IONOS
• NameSilo
• Plesk
• WordPress.com

For more details, see our custom domain setup guide.

This is a dramatic upgrade which should reduce global redirect times and increase capacity for traffic surges.

Icons are also shown when detected when entering URLs.

https://lnk.ly/ABC123.qr.png

This returns a PNG image of the QR code, complete with any saved styles, colors, and logos. No authentication is required, making it easy to embed QR codes in emails, documents, or webpages using a simple <img> tag.

For developers who need more control, an authenticated API endpoint is also available at /api/v1/link/:id/qr/png, which supports query parameter overrides for colors, styles, and size.

See 'QR Code Generator API' for full documentation.

Refreshed sidebar - The navigation sidebar has been updated with a sleek dark theme, clearer icons, and better visual hierarchy so you can find what you need faster.

Sparkline previews - Each link now shows a mini traffic sparkline directly in the table, giving you an at-a-glance view of recent click activity without opening the full report.

Inline QR codes - QR codes are now displayed as thumbnails alongside each link, making it easy to identify and download them.

Streamlined toolbar - Column visibility and data export controls are now accessible from a clean toolbar at the top of the table.

Faster page loads - The dashboard now loads key data earlier and defers non-essential scripts, so you'll see your links and analytics faster than before.

Manage workspaces in-app - You can now create new workspaces and rename existing ones without leaving the dashboard. No more page reloads or context switching.

Smaller downloads - We've reduced the amount of data your browser needs to download on each visit, which is especially helpful on slower connections.

Supported Languages

• English
• Spanish (Español)
• French (Français)
• German (Deutsch)
• Portuguese (Português)
• Italian (Italiano)
• Dutch (Nederlands)
• Japanese (日本語)
• Korean (한국어)
• Chinese (中文)
• Polish (Polski)

Your language is automatically selected based on your browser settings, or you can switch manually using the language selector in the navigation bar.