Links people can read before they click.

Branded short links: gc.mw/launch instead of a random code

A link is read before it is clicked. gc.mw/menu tells a person what happens next; bit.ly/3xKq9Zp tells them nothing except that somebody used a shortener. That gap is the entire argument for branded links, and it is smaller than the marketing usually claims — but it is real, and it shows up in the two places that matter: printed material and anything a person has to type.

What we mean by branded here

Three separate things get sold under the same word, and they are worth pulling apart.

Your own words after the slash. A custom alias: gc.mw/diwali, gc.mw/price-list, gc.mw/careers. Available on Pro and above.

Your own domain before the slash. links.yourbrand.com/diwali, which needs DNS and lives on the custom domain links page.

A namespace of your own on ours. Claim a name and get yourname.gc.mw/diwali on Pro without touching DNS at all. This is the middle option nobody else offers, and it is the one most small teams should take first.

Why our codes are four characters

Random codes come from a base58 alphabet — the usual sixty-two characters minus 0, O, I and l. Those four are what make somebody type a link wrong off a poster or mishear it on a phone call. Dropping them costs a little address space and removes a whole category of support ticket.

Paid plans get four-character codes, free and anonymous links get five. Four base58 characters is roughly eleven million codes per domain; when occupancy on a length passes forty per cent, the generator moves up a character rather than retrying collisions forever. So gc.mw/k7Rq is ten characters against Bitly's fourteen, as of September 2026.

Four characters sounds like a rounding error. It is, on a web page. It stops being one on a business card set in 9 pt, and it stops being one inside a QR code, where a shorter payload means fewer modules and physically larger squares at the same printed size.

A worked example

Here is a campaign we ran for a print run of 6,000 table cards.

The destination was a menu page with five UTM parameters hanging off it — 168 characters. The alias was gc.mw/eat, created on Pro with the UTM tags stored on the link rather than typed into the URL, so the printed thing stayed nine characters long and the tags still arrived in Google Analytics through the redirect.

Two weeks in, the client moved the menu to a new host and the path changed. We edited one field. The 6,000 cards never knew. That is the part of branded links that pays for itself, and it has nothing to do with branding.

What the analytics show

Every click is recorded on the redirect and handed to a queue — the redirect path itself does no database write and no user-agent parsing, which is why it stays fast. Enrichment happens afterwards.

You get clicks and unique visitors by day, country, referrer, device, browser and operating system. Referrers are classified into search, social, email and ads using a rule list, so t.co, x.com and twitter.com all land in one row instead of three. Bots are scored and separated rather than deleted, so the number you report is human traffic and the number you debug with is everything.

QR scans are counted apart from clicks. The QR image encodes the short link with a ?qr marker, so a scan from a table card and a click from an Instagram story never end up in the same bucket. If you have ever tried to justify a print spend from a single click total, that split is the number you were missing.

Retention differs by plan: 30 days on Free, 365 on Pro, 1,095 on Business and Team.

Where branded links do not help

They do not improve deliverability. A brand-new domain has no reputation, and email filters and corporate proxies treat it accordingly. A bit.ly link passes places a gc.mw link does not, and no amount of engineering fixes that in a year — which is why we say it here instead of hiding it.

They do not help SEO. Short links carry X-Robots-Tag: noindex, and search engines index the destination. Anyone selling you branded links as a ranking factor is selling you something else.

They do not survive a shortener that dies. That risk is the reason we ship CSV and API export of every link and its destination on every paid plan, and the reason custom domains matter: links on a domain you own can be re-pointed at another service the day you decide to leave.

Try it before you sign up

The anonymous link you get lasts 30 days and your browser holds a claim token, so creating a free account afterwards moves the link in and drops the expiry. Nothing has to be recreated. The rest — aliases, UTM presets, expiry dates, click limits, passwords, per-country and per-device rules — sits in the dashboard on the plans that include them, priced on the pricing page.

The honest summary: pay for branded links if you print things, read links aloud, or need to change a destination after it has left the building. If your links only ever get pasted into a chat window, a random code is fine and you should spend the money elsewhere.