CleanURL

Most links people share carry more than the address of the page. A tail like ?utm_source=...&fbclid=... tells the site which campaign, which post and sometimes which account the click came from. When you forward that link to a friend or a group, you forward the tail too, and everyone who opens it is counted as coming from you.

CleanURL takes a link, cuts the tracking query off and sends back the clean version. It does one more thing that makes it useful in a group chat: a link to X, TikTok or Instagram comes back with a proper preview, so people can see the post without opening the app or the site.

The bot is a small open-source project written in Go by a developer who goes by HeyMeco. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence, it was last updated in June 2026, and the same repository ships a Docker image, so anyone who does not want their links to pass through somebody else's server can run a private copy with their own bot token. The author says the public instance keeps no logs and is hosted for free.

It is not a big service, and it does not pretend to be. For a habit of cleaning links before you post them, or for a group where people keep dropping links with long tails, it does exactly what it says.