URL expander

What is a URL expander?

A short link says nothing about where it goes. The same few characters can hide an article, an affiliate wrapper, or a fake login page, and that opacity is exactly why scammers like short links. A URL expander follows the link for you, on our servers, and shows the real destination before your browser ever touches it.

Why it matters

For most people, the only check a link ever gets is clicking it, and by then the page has already loaded. Short links in texts and emails are the standard phishing delivery for exactly that reason. Expanding the link first moves the decision to before the risk: you see the destination, its age, and its records while nothing has touched your device.

This one goes further than unrolling the redirects: it also pulls the destination's public records, who registered the domain and when, its DNS, its TLS certificate, and runs the safety checks below, so you can judge a link the way an abuse team would, from one paste.

What the expander shows

One paste unrolls the link and pulls the public records of wherever it lands.

Redirect chain

Every hop with its HTTP status, from the link you pasted to the last stop, including chains that bounce through several shorteners.

Final destination

The page the chain lands on, shown with its own title, description, and preview image where the site provides them.

Domain age

When the domain was registered, straight from the registry. Days-old domains are the classic phishing tell.

TLS certificate

Who issued the certificate and when it expires, from the destination's own handshake.

DNS records

The A, MX, and NS records behind the destination host, as currently served.

Safety checks

spoo.me's abuse blocklist and Google Web Risk, with the result stated plainly, and links to VirusTotal, Safe Browsing, and the Wayback Machine for second opinions.

How it works

1. Paste any short link. Plain http is fine, and so are chains that pass through several shorteners on the way.
2. Our server follows the redirects hop by hop, reading only status codes and Location headers. Nothing loads in your browser and no page content is fetched.
3. You get the full chain, the destination's own preview, the domain's public records from the registry's RDAP server, the DNS, and its TLS handshake, and the safety checks, all before you decide to click.

Unshorten a link before you click it

A short link hides its destination by design. The same bit.ly-style code can lead to an article, an affiliate wrapper, or a login page that isn't your bank's. Unshortening it first shows the real URL, who registered the domain, and how old it is, so the decision to open it is made with the facts in hand instead of after the page has already loaded.

One tool, several names

URL expander, link unshortener, redirect checker, redirect tracer: different searches, the same job. This page does all of it in one pass. It expands the short URL, traces every redirect in the chain with its status code, and pulls the destination's records so a safety read is possible without visiting anything.

When to reach for it

• A link from an email or SMS you didn't expect, before it gets a click.
• Investigating a suspicious or phishing link without ever loading it.
• Redirect audits during SEO work, where a stray 302 or a long chain of hops quietly leaks ranking signal.
• Unwrapping t.co, lnkd.in, or amzn.to wrappers to see the real article or product page.

Checking how your own page unfurls instead? That's the link preview checker. Putting a link on something printed? The QR code generator encodes any link, and a shortened one counts its scans.

Frequently asked questions

Short answers about expanding links and what gets checked.