How to shorten a link (and keep control of it afterwards)

Nine seconds, signed out: open the homepage, paste the long URL into the box, press Shorten. The short link lands on your clipboard automatically, with a QR link and a copy button next to it. That part is not interesting. What happens over the next 30 days is.

What you actually got

An anonymous link is a 5-character code from a base58 alphabet — digits and letters with 0, O, I and l removed, so nobody reading a code off a poster confuses a zero with a capital O. With gc.mw/ in front, the whole thing is 11 characters.

It redirects with a 302, not a 301, which is the difference between a link you can still fix and a link the browser has memorised. It expires 30 days from creation. And it carries a claim token that your browser quietly stored under gc.claimTokens.

The three-step version with an account

1. 1

   Sign in from the browser that made the links

   On your first sign-in the stored claim tokens are handed to the claim endpoint one at a time. Links that are still unclaimed move into your workspace with their codes intact; tokens that have already been used are dropped.

2. 2

   Open Links and paste the long URL

   The free plan includes 10 new links a month. The destination is checked before the link is created: http and https only, no private network addresses, nothing on the block list, and not a gc.mw link itself.

3. 3

   Choose the words, if you are on Pro

   Leave the code random or type your own alias: 4 to 64 characters, letters, digits, hyphens and underscores, starting and ending with a letter or digit. gc.mw/menu beats gc.mw/k7Qw on anything a human reads aloud.

Why the code length changes

Free and anonymous links get 5 characters; paid links get 4. That is not an artificial gate — a 4-character base58 namespace holds about 11 million codes, and those go to accounts that stay. A second rule sits behind it: when more than 40 per cent of the codes at a given length are taken, new links start using one more character. Nobody has to think about it and the namespace never runs out.

Two categories of alias are refused. Reserved words are every path the app itself uses — login, pricing, blog, api and roughly two hundred others — because a link at gc.mw/login is a phishing kit with extra steps. Aliases containing a protected brand name (paypal, hdfc, instagram and the rest of that list) are created but held for review instead of being served straight away.

What the link can do once it is yours

Option	Section in the editor	Plan
Change the destination	Destination	Any
301 instead of 302	Schedule and limits	Any
Expiry date and click limit	Schedule and limits	Any
Scheduled start time	Schedule and limits	Pro
Password	Password	Pro
UTM parameters	UTM parameters	Pro
Custom preview card	Link preview (Open Graph)	Pro
Geo and device rules, A/B split	Geo and device targeting, A/B testing	Business

Two things are on every link regardless of plan. Add .qr to the short link for a PNG of its QR code, or .svg for the vector version; scans that arrive through that code are counted separately from ordinary clicks. Add + and you get the link's public page — where it goes, and, if you switch public stats on, how many people clicked it.

The mistake worth avoiding

People shorten the URL they happen to have open. That URL usually already carries somebody else's tracking parameters, or a session id, or a ?ref= from the page they copied it from. The short link then preserves all of it for as long as the link lives.

Open the destination in a clean browser window, take the URL from there, add your own campaign parameters if you want them, and shorten that. Thirty seconds of work that stops a year of analytics being wrong.

When not to shorten

If the link is going in an email to people who already trust you, the full URL is often better: it survives forwarding, it shows the destination, and filters treat it as less suspicious than a redirect. If it is going into an SMS, a printed piece, a bio, a slide or a QR code, shorten it. Those are the places where length, editability and scan reliability actually cost money.