Your domain, our redirects.

Custom domain short links: two DNS records and no server

The reason to put short links on your own domain is not that go.yourbrand.com/sale looks better than gc.mw/sale. It is that go.yourbrand.com/sale keeps working if you stop paying us.

That is an odd thing for us to lead with. It is also the only argument for custom domains that survives contact with a five-year print run, and every other benefit — recognition, click-through, filters that trust a domain they have seen before — sits downstream of it.

The two records

A CNAME. links in your zone, pointing at cname.gc.mw. That is the record that makes the redirect arrive at us.

A TXT. _gc-verify.links in your zone, containing gc-verify= and a token we generate once and show you once. That is the record that proves the domain is yours, so nobody else can attach links.yourbrand.com to their account and issue certificates against it.

Both are checked together. A CNAME without the TXT verifies nothing; a TXT without the CNAME resolves nothing. The checker re-runs every five minutes until both pass, then TLS is issued and renewed automatically. There are no certificate files to install and no cron job to forget.

A worked example

A retailer with eleven stores wanted one code on window vinyl per city.

They added go.brand.example as a CNAME to cname.gc.mw and the matching TXT. Verification passed in about four minutes. They then created eleven links — go.brand.example/mum, /blr, /del and so on — each with a geo rule underneath, so a scan from outside India lands on the international page instead of a store locator that means nothing to the visitor.

The window vinyl carries the same six-character path in every city. The analytics are per link and per domain, so the marketing lead reads eleven rows and one total without exporting anything.

Here is the part that made the decision easy for them: if they ever leave, the vinyl still says go.brand.example. They re-point one CNAME and the codes resolve somewhere else. Nothing in a shop window has to change. Compare that to eleven cities of vinyl that say a shortener's name.

What behaves differently on your domain

Everything a gc.mw link does works on your domain: aliases, UTM presets, expiry, click limits, passwords, per-country and per-device rules, QR at /code.qr and /code.svg, and the + stats page.

Two things are deliberately different.

Unknown codes 404 on your domain. They never fall through to a gc.mw page, because a visitor who typed your domain should not land on our brand.

The bare hostname is yours to point. Redirect it to your main site, serve a bio page from it, or leave it answering nothing. It is your name; we do not squat on it.

The reputation you are borrowing, and the one you are building

A new subdomain has no history. Email filters, corporate proxies and messaging apps treat it as unknown, which sometimes means a warning interstitial and occasionally means a silent block. This is the honest cost of moving off a shortener whose domain has been in allow-lists since 2008.

It gets better with traffic and with time, and it gets better faster if the domain is a subdomain of a site that already has a reputation. go.brand.example inherits some of brand.example; a freshly registered brandgo.example inherits nothing. Choose accordingly.

Check what a domain is actually doing

Paste a hostname or a full link and you get the HTTP status, the certificate details, every hop in the redirect chain and a plain-language verdict. Two things worth looking for after you set a domain up: a chain that drops from https to http anywhere, and a certificate that does not cover the exact hostname people will type.

Three custom domains are included on Business and Team, more are an add-on, and the hard cap per workspace is 50. The branded links page covers what to do before you are ready for DNS, and the pricing page has the rest.