How notlinking.com works
What happens when someone clicks
Click an ordinary link and the site you land on is told exactly which page you clicked from. The technical name for what carries it is the Referer header. That's how a forum post, a chat message, or a link in someone's bio ends up in a stranger's analytics dashboard.
A link through notlinking.com passes you straight through, telling your browser not to say where you came from — the instruction is Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, and browsers apply it to the page they send you on to. The site you land on receives nothing at all about the page you came from. There's no page to look at, nothing is written down, and the detour takes about a thousandth of a second.
Only ordinary web addresses are passed on — anything else is refused, on purpose. And a notlinking.com link pointed back at notlinking.com is refused rather than wrapped again: once you've gone through once, there's nothing left to hide.
Anywhere you'd paste a link
Forums are the classic case, but it makes no difference where the link ends up — Discord, Slack, someone's bio, a text message. Anywhere a link goes, putting the prefix in front works the same way.
Anywhere you would write a link, put it in front:
[url=notlinking.com/?https://example.com/thread]see this[/url]Everything after the first ? is treated as the destination, exactly as you wrote it — including anything after its own ?, so ?a=1&b=2 arrives intact.
Links with a # in them need the other form, notlinking.com/go/<code>, because the part after a # never leaves your browser. The builder on the homepage switches to it for you — though nothing here requires the builder; typing the prefix by hand does exactly the same thing.
Frequently asked
What does notlinking.com do?
It anonymizes a link: the site you land on can see that someone arrived, but not which page they clicked from.
Is it free?
Yes. No accounts, no sign-up, nothing to pay for.
What information do you keep?
Nothing that could identify you. The address you're going to, the page you came from, and your browser's description of itself are used to build the response and then thrown away — see what we do and don't see.
Will the site I land on know I came from here?
No. Your browser is told not to say where you came from, and it applies that to the page it opens next.
Are all links allowed through?
Most, yes. A small number of destinations known to be dangerous are refused outright, and some — link shorteners, addresses using unusual characters — show a warning naming where you're headed before you continue.
Do I need the builder, or can I write the link myself?
Neither is required — the builder is just a convenience. Putting notlinking.com/? in front of a link by hand does exactly the same thing.
Can I put a notlinking.com link through notlinking.com again?
No, and there'd be no point. A link pointed back at notlinking.com is refused rather than wrapped again — once you've gone through once, there's nothing left to hide.