URL Shortener Link Guide: How It Works, Free vs. Owned

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A URL shortener link is a short web address that redirects anyone who clicks it to a longer destination page, and nearly every tool on the market can create one in seconds. The question that actually matters is who controls that link once it's live — a free shortener lives on someone else's domain and can vanish if that company changes its pricing or shuts down, the way Google did with goo.gl. Links built on a domain and server you control don't have that expiration date.

TL;DR:

  • A URL shortener link works by storing your long URL and returning an HTTP redirect — usually a 301 or 302 — when someone clicks the short code.
  • Shortening a URL for free takes three steps: paste the long link, generate the short code, copy and share it, but free tools skip custom domains and deep analytics.
  • Google shut down its goo.gl shortener for new links in March 2018 and killed existing redirects in 2019 — there's no current Google URL shortener.
  • A/B split testing on a short link lets you route a percentage of clicks to two different destinations without touching your website code, something most free shorteners don't offer.
  • Free and low-cost shorteners put your links on borrowed infrastructure; a self-hosted shortener keeps the domain, the data, and the redirect logic on a server you control.
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Table of Contents

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Every URL shortener does the same basic job: it stores a mapping between a short code, like /a7x2k, and a long destination URL in a database. When someone clicks the short link, their browser sends a request to the shortener's server, which looks up the code and responds with an HTTP redirect — almost always a 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) status code — pointing the browser to the real page. The whole exchange typically takes under 200 milliseconds, which is why you barely notice it happening.

That redirect choice matters more than most people realize. A 301 tells search engines the destination has permanently moved and passes along most of the link's SEO value; a 302 signals a temporary redirect and search engines treat it differently, as Google's own crawling documentation explains. If you're shortening links for marketing campaigns you plan to track and report on for years, the redirect type your shortener uses quietly affects how search engines credit the destination page.

How to Shorten a URL in Three Steps (Free or Branded)

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Shortening a URL is not complicated, which is exactly why so many tools exist to do it. The process is the same whether you're using a free public tool or your own branded domain:

  1. Paste the long URL into the shortener's input field.
  2. Choose or customize the short code — most tools generate a random string automatically, but many let you type a custom alias if the domain and slug combination is available.
  3. Generate and copy the short link, then share it wherever you need: email, social posts, a printed flyer, or a QR code.

That's the entire mechanical process. The differences between tools show up after this point — in whether you can use your own domain, how long the link survives, and what data you get back about who clicked it. If you want your short links to carry your brand name instead of a stranger's domain, the real options for shortening a URL with your own domain are worth understanding before you commit to a tool.

How Can I Shorten a URL for Free? What You Give Up

Free URL shorteners are genuinely free for a reason: you're trading ownership and data for convenience. A free public shortener typically limits you to its own domain, caps how many links you can create or how much click history you can see, and in many cases reserves the right to insert ads or interstitial pages before your redirect fires. You also have no control over what happens to your links if the company pivots, gets acquired, or simply decides to sunset the free tier — which has happened before, at scale, with a major shortener run by one of the largest companies in tech.

None of that makes free shorteners useless. For a one-off link in a text message or a Slack channel, a free tool is the right tool. The trouble starts when those "temporary" links end up on printed materials, in old emails, or baked into a QR code on a product label — places you can't easily update once the shortener changes its terms.

Pro Tip: If you're measuring a split test through a short link, don't trust raw click counts in the first few hours. Messaging apps like Slack, iMessage, and Discord all pre-fetch links to generate preview cards, and that automated crawl traffic shows up as a "click" in most analytics dashboards. It can quietly skew a 50/50 split test before a single real visitor has seen either version.

Does Google Still Have a URL Shortener? What Happened to goo.gl

No. Google does not currently operate a public URL shortener. The company's own goo.gl service stopped accepting new short links in March 2018 and the Google Developers Blog confirmed the service would be retired entirely, which it was by 2019 — meaning any goo.gl link created before the cutoff eventually stopped redirecting at all.

goo.gl stopped accepting new links in March 2018 and stopped redirecting old ones completely by 2019 — nearly a decade of saved links broke in one sweep.

If you're searching for "Google URL shortener free" hoping to find an official replacement, there isn't one. Google's search and analytics products don't include a general-purpose link shortener today, which is part of why the market is now split between paid hosted platforms and self-hosted alternatives rather than one dominant free option.

Once you look past the marketing pages, every URL shortener on the market falls into one of three categories, and each one makes a different trade-off between cost, control, and convenience.

Model Typical cost Custom domain Who owns the click data Link permanence risk
Free public shortener $0 No, or limited The provider High — tied to provider's business decisions
Paid hosted platform Monthly/annual subscription Yes, often per-domain fee Shared with provider Medium — survives as long as you keep paying
Self-hosted shortener One-time license + your own server Unlimited, no extra fee You, entirely Low — survives as long as your server does

This table is the real answer to "what are the top 10 URL shorteners" — there isn't a single ranked list that fits everyone, because the right pick depends on which row of this table you're optimizing for. A side-by-side comparison of specific hosted tools, including the ones that dominate search results for this topic, is covered in this breakdown of alternatives to the most popular hosted shortener.

What Actually Separates a Good Shortener From a Basic One

Beyond the redirect itself, a handful of features determine whether a shortener is actually useful for business, versus just a novelty for shrinking a link in a tweet.

Branded, owned domains. A short link on your own domain builds trust and brand recall every time someone sees it; a link on a shared public domain doesn't. The difference between having access to a custom domain and actually owning it matters more than it sounds, especially if your provider charges a separate fee per domain or restricts how many you can connect.

Password protection. Some short links need to stay private — a client proposal, an internal document, a pre-launch landing page. Few free tools support this at all, and the options that actually work for password-protecting a link are narrower than most people expect.

Styled QR codes. A short link and a QR code are the same redirect in two formats, and a logo-embedded, on-brand QR code converts better than a generic black-and-white grid. Styling a QR code without breaking its scan reliability is a real design constraint, not just an aesthetic choice.

Click analytics with geography. Knowing a link got 400 clicks tells you almost nothing. Knowing it got 400 clicks, 60% from mobile, concentrated in three cities, in the two hours after an email went out — that's data you can act on.

A/B split testing. This is the feature most free and even many paid shorteners leave out entirely, and it's the one that pays for itself fastest if you run any kind of paid traffic.

A/B split testing on a link means one short URL can route visitors to two or more different destinations based on a percentage split you define — 50/50, 70/30, whatever you need — without editing a single line of code on your website. You set the split once, share one short link everywhere (on a business card, in an ad, inside a QR code), and the shortener handles the routing and the click counting on each variant.

This is useful anywhere you can't easily run a true on-site A/B test: comparing two landing page designs before either is finished, testing two different offers from the same print ad, or routing a printed QR code to two checkout flows to see which converts better. Because the split happens at the redirect level, you don't need to touch your CMS, your ad platform, or your server configuration to run the test.

Most free shorteners don't support this at all, and most paid platforms that do gate it behind their higher-priced tiers. That's worth knowing before you assume split testing is a feature you'll have access to just because you're paying for a shortener.

Link rot — a link that no longer resolves to its original content — isn't a hypothetical. Research led by Harvard Law School found that nearly half of the hyperlinks cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to their original source material, and the rot rate was even higher in law review articles. That study measured ordinary web links; a shortened link adds a second point of failure, because now both the destination page and the shortener's own redirect service have to stay alive.

Harvard researchers found that nearly half the hyperlinks cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer lead to their original source.

The difference between ordinary link rot and shortener-caused link rot is speed. A normal webpage decays gradually, one broken link at a time. A shortener shutting down breaks every single link it ever generated, all at once, on whatever day the company flips the switch — the exact scenario that played out with goo.gl. If your short links are printed on packaging, embossed on signage, or baked into a QR code that's already in the world, that's not a minor inconvenience; it's a dead link with no way to fix it after the fact.

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Everything above points to the same conclusion: a free or subscription shortener works fine right up until the provider changes something you don't control, and then every link you've ever shared is at risk. Kortli is a self-hosted link shortener you install on your own Linux server for a one-time payment instead of a recurring subscription — your links, your domain, your click data, with no monthly bill and no provider that can shut the service off from under you.

Kortli covers the features this article walked through: custom branded domains with no per-domain fee, password-protected links, A/B split testing, styled and logo-embedded QR codes, and click and geographic analytics that live on your own server instead of someone else's. The honest caveat: this is a tool for people comfortable installing software on a server, not a zero-setup hosted dashboard — check the spec sheet before buying if you'd rather not touch a terminal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Paste the long URL into any shortening tool, let it generate a short code (or choose your own custom alias if the tool allows it), and copy the resulting short link to share. The mechanism is identical across free and paid tools — what differs is the domain the short link lives on and the analytics you get back.

Does Google still have a URL shortener?

No. Google's goo.gl shortener stopped accepting new links in March 2018 and stopped redirecting existing ones by 2019, and the company has not replaced it with another public shortening product. There is currently no official Google URL shortener available to consumers or businesses.

How can I shorten a URL for free?

Use any free public shortening tool, paste in your long URL, and generate a short code immediately at no cost. The trade-off is that you typically can't use your own domain, your click history and analytics are limited, and the link's long-term survival depends entirely on that provider staying in business.

What are the top 10 URL shorteners?

There's no single ranked list that fits every use case, since free, paid, and self-hosted shorteners each solve a different problem around cost, branding, and data ownership. A detailed comparison of specific hosted alternatives is covered in a dedicated breakdown of options people switch to.

A generic tool like TinyURL puts your short link on its own shared public domain, while a custom link shortener lets you use your own branded domain for every short link you create. The redirect mechanics are the same; the difference is brand recognition, trust, and who owns the domain your links live on.

Most free shorteners let you customize the short code, or "alias," as long as the one you want isn't already taken on that domain, so you can rename a generic string into something more readable. You generally can't change the domain itself for free — that requires either a paid branded-domain plan or a self-hosted shortener on your own domain.

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