Where does this link go?

What the two steps are

The read never leaves this tab. A link is a small structured thing and most of what matters is written in it: the real host is the part just before the first slash, whatever is written before an @ sign is a decoy, a well-known brand name in the middle of a host is not that brand, and parameters beginning utm_ exist to identify you or the campaign rather than to choose a page.

The follow asks a server to open the link so that you do not have to. It goes one hop at a time and reports each one: the host, how it answered, and whether it sent us on. The server sees the page but you never see the page; it comes back with addresses and status codes only. The site being visited sees a request from Cloudflare's network identifying itself as this tool, not from you.

The link it will not follow for you

Some links do something the moment they are opened: unsubscribe, confirm an address, sign you in, accept an invitation, cancel an order. Many of those work exactly once. If a server opened one on your behalf, your own click afterwards would do nothing, and you would not know why. So anything that looks like one of those is read but not followed, and the choice to follow it anyway is yours, behind a box you have to tick.

What it cannot see

A page can send you on with a line of script rather than a redirect, and this does not run scripts, so a chain can end at a page that would have kept going in a browser. Some sites answer a bot differently from a person. And where a tracking link's real destination is hidden inside a database rather than the address, only following it will show where it goes.

Results for a link are kept for ten minutes so a second look does not visit it again. Nothing you paste is stored. This is not a safety verdict: a link can go somewhere ordinary and still be a bad idea, and the page counts and reports rather than judges.