Someone Sent You a bit.ly Link. Here's How to See the Real URL.
A message lands with one line of text and a bit.ly link. No context, and no hint of where it goes.
To expand a bit.ly link, add a plus sign to the end and open it. So bit.ly/abc123 becomes bit.ly/abc123+. Bitly answers with a preview page naming the real address, and you never load the site.
That trick still works, but it breaks more often than most guides admit.
How do you expand a bit.ly link?
Do it in the address bar, not in the chat app.
- Copy the short link.
- Paste it into your browser's address bar.
- Type a
+at the end. - Press Enter.
Bitly returns a page with a heading that reads Destinations. Under it sits the full URL, plus the date someone created the link.
We ran this on 19 September 2026 against one of Bitly's own public links, bit.ly/1sNZMwL. Plain, it answered 301 and pointed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitly. With the plus sign, it answered 200 and drew the preview page.
One habit matters here: type the plus sign yourself. Some chat apps can swallow a trailing plus when you copy a link, and then you land on the site instead of the preview.
What the plus page will not tell you
Start with the correction, because this one is everywhere.
The plus page used to show a link's click count to anyone, and it no longer does. The page we loaded today says so plainly. Its exact words: "If this is a Bitly link you created from your account, please log in to view the click data."
So the old advice — add a plus to see how many clicks a link got — is out of date. You get the destination and nothing else.
Then there are the cases where the trick fails completely.
Branded domains. Bitly lets paying customers use their own short domain, and the plus sign does not work there. We tried bitly.is/Bitly+ today, which is Bitly's own branded domain, and got a 404. A branded domain is exactly what Bitly sells to its paying customers, so business links are where this fails.
Dead links. A slug that no longer exists returns 404, with or without the plus, so you learn nothing about it.
Scripted checks. Use GET rather than HEAD, because a HEAD request to a plus URL returns 405 Method Not Allowed.
Other shorteners use other symbols
The plus sign is a Bitly convention, and it does not carry over to anybody else.
TinyURL. Add a plus and TinyURL forwards you to tinyurl.com/preview/<slug>, which displays the destination and which you can type yourself. The older preview.tinyurl.com form is still repeated in security articles everywhere. In our test it returned a bot challenge rather than a preview, so treat it as unreliable rather than gone.
is.gd. Add a dash, not a plus. The is.gd FAQ says to reach the preview page "by adding a dash (-) to the end of the link". Its click statistics are optional at creation, so most is.gd links carry none.
Some links arrive from a shortener you have never heard of. What a URL shortener actually does explains why they all behave much the same way.
The method that needs no other website
On a locked-down work laptop, one command still works:
curl -sI https://bit.ly/1sNZMwL
Today that printed:
HTTP/2 301
location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitly
Read two lines. A status of 301, 302, 307 or 308 means a redirect, and the location: header holds the destination.
Two notes on it. The -I flag sends a HEAD request, and some servers refuse HEAD entirely. When that happens, ask for the body and throw it away:
curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://bit.ly/abc123
The bigger limit is chains. This shows the first hop only, and one short link can point at another. Our guide to checking where a short link goes walks through the rest of the chain.
Which expander sites still work?
We checked a batch today, and four answered properly: WhereGoes, ExpandURL, CheckShortURL and unshorten.me.
Be clear about what that test means, because we checked whether these sites work, not whether they are trustworthy. You hand an expander the link you are curious about, so pick one the way you would pick any website.
One name failed outright. urlex.org does not resolve, so there is no site to load, and it is still recommended all over the web. Any list of expanders older than a few months is worth re-testing before you trust it.
Why no preview can promise where you will land
Here is the part almost nobody writes down.
Bitly sells a feature called Dynamic Routing on its paid Growth and Premium plans. Its pricing page describes it as routing "users to different URLs based on location and more" (checked 19 September 2026).
So one short link can legitimately send two people to two different pages.
Now think about what an expander really is. It is a server sitting in a data centre, in some country, on some platform, with its own fingerprint.
It reports where the link sent it, and usually that is where the link will send you as well. It is not a guarantee, and no tool on this page can turn it into one.
Three checks that work less well than people think
Google's Safe Browsing checker. Paste a full short link and you get "No available data". Google's own page explains why: a domain like tinyurl.com holds "a lot of content", so one verdict cannot possibly cover it. Cut it back to the bare domain and the verdict describes the shortener, not the destination.
Public scanners. VirusTotal's terms say it in capitals: "IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO PUBLICLY SHARE A SAMPLE… DO NOT SEND IT." urlscan.io defaults to a public scan with a live public feed. A short link sent to you can hold a password reset token or an invoice number. Scan it publicly and you publish it.
Hovering. It shows the address written into the link, and for a short link that is still the short link. The address itself can also lie. In current Chrome, https://www.google.com@example.org/ goes to example.org with no warning. MDN calls this a semantic URL attack. The real host is whatever follows the last @.
More of these warning signs live in our post on spotting an unsafe link.
Questions people ask
Does the plus sign work on every Bitly link?
No, it works on bit.ly addresses only. It does not work on Bitly branded domains, where a customer uses their own short domain instead. We tested bitly.is/Bitly+ today and got a 404. A branded domain is what Bitly sells to paying customers, so expect business links to fail this way.
Can I see how many clicks a bit.ly link got?
Not any more, because the preview page shows the destination only and tells you to log in as the link's owner. Any article promising public click counts from a plus sign is describing how Bitly used to work.
Is opening the plus page safe?
You load a page on Bitly, not the destination, so the site at the far end never hears from you. That is the whole point of it. Just remember that the page names an address and stops there, making no claim about whether that address is safe.
Does a clean preview mean the link is safe?
No, a preview tells you only where a link points right now, for whoever asked. It says nothing about the page, its age or its intentions. Treat it as one fact about the link, never as a verdict on it.
Check one before you click it
Paste a bit.ly link into the free Bitly link checker and it displays the destination, with no account and no sign-up. Whatever it shows, the habit in this post still holds: a preview tells you where a link points, not whether the page is honest.