How to remove tracking from a link on macOS
You can do this with Paste My. One shortcut copies a link with its tracking parameters stripped, so the URL you paste is the page rather than a trail.
Copy a link out of a newsletter, a search result or a social post and it usually arrives with a tail: a long string of parameters after the question mark recording which email you clicked, which campaign sent you, which post you came from.
Paste that into a group chat and everyone who opens it is now attributed to your click. Paste it into a document and the tail stays there forever, making a clean URL unnecessarily ugly and unnecessarily specific about you.
Trimming it by hand means finding where the real URL ends, which is not always obvious. One shortcut does it properly.
Copy the link without tracking
Copy the link as usual
Copy it however you normally would — from the address bar, from a right-click on the link, out of an email.
It goes onto your clipboard and into your history with its tail intact.
Press ⇧⌘L
The first link on the clipboard is copied back without its tracking parameters.
utm_parameters and click IDs are removed; the part of the URL that actually identifies the page is left alone.It works from wherever you are, with no window and nothing to confirm.
It removes tracking parameters, not everything after the question mark. Parameters a page genuinely needs — a search term, a page number, a product variant — are what make the link work, and they stay.
Paste the clean link
⌘V and what arrives is the page, without the trail.
The link still goes to the same place. Stripping tracking changes who gets told about the click, not where the click lands.
See what a link is carrying first
If you would rather look before you strip, open the link in your history. Its address is shown parsed out, with the tracking parameters highlighted, so you can see exactly what is riding along before you decide.
From there you can copy the address, or open it in your browser — and only http and https links can be opened, which rules out a whole category of unpleasant surprise.
Your history, newest at the top. The sources list is on the left; each entry carries a badge for the kind of thing it is.
Why it is worth doing
This is a small courtesy with a few different beneficiaries, and it costs one keystroke.
- The people you send it to. A tracked link attributes their visit to your click. They did not choose that and mostly do not know it happened.
- You. A campaign tail can encode which email address received the message. Forwarding it forwards that.
- The link itself. A clean URL is shorter, more readable, and does not break when a campaign parameter expires or gets reused.
- Anything you are keeping. Links pasted into notes and documents outlive the campaign that produced them. The tail is noise by the time you read it back.
Make it happen automatically
If you clean links often enough to notice, stop doing it by hand. Rules act on clippings the moment they are captured, and cleaning tracking from a link is one of the actions a rule can take.
A rule has a trigger and an action. Triggers can match any item, one kind of item, a particular app, or content containing given text. Actions can pin, hide, add to a collection, redact, or clean tracking from a link.
So “every link I copy gets cleaned” is a rule you set once, and then never think about the shortcut again.
The same mechanism is useful in the other direction: auto-pin everything copied from your notes app, or hide everything from a sensitive tool, without touching either setting again.
Three more that work the same way
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⇧⌘C | Re-copy whatever is on the clipboard as plain text |
| ⇧⌘L | Copy a link with its tracking parameters stripped out |
| ⇧⌘B | Re-copy the clipboard as Base64 |
| ⌥⇧⌘F | Turn copied path text into real files |
Each one converts what is on the clipboard and puts the result straight back, from anywhere, leaving your history untouched.
If the link still has a tail
What is left is not tracking
Plenty of parameters are load-bearing. A search query, a page number, a video timestamp, a product size — remove those and the link stops working or lands somewhere else.
Open the clipping and look at its parsed address: tracking parameters are highlighted, so you can see which is which rather than guessing.
There were several links on the clipboard
The shortcut cleans the first link it finds. If you copied a block of text containing several URLs, copy the one you want on its own and try again.
It is a shortened link
A shortened link has no visible parameters to remove — the tracking is on the other side of the redirect. Opening it and copying the address you land on gives you something to clean.
Questions people ask
What exactly does it remove?
utm_ parameters and click IDs — the ones that exist to attribute a visit. Parameters the page needs to work are left alone.
Does the link still go to the same page?
Yes. Removing tracking changes who is told about the click, not where the click lands.
Can I see what was removed?
Open the link in your history. Its address is shown parsed out with the tracking parameters highlighted, so you can see what is there before and after.
Can I clean every link automatically?
Yes. A rule can clean tracking from links as they are captured, so you set it once and stop thinking about it.
Does it work on links copied from my iPhone?
It works on whatever is on the clipboard, so a link that arrived over Universal Clipboard is cleaned the same way anything else is.
Is the original link kept?
Yes, in your history, with its parameters intact — so if the tail turns out to have mattered you can get it back.
Does it work on links inside a longer piece of text?
It cleans the first link it finds on the clipboard. For a block of text with several URLs in it, copy the one you want on its own first.
Will the recipient be able to tell I cleaned it?
They receive the page's own address. There is nothing added, only campaign parameters removed, so what they get is the plainer version of the same link.
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