Cloaked Links

Raw affiliate URLs are ugly, long, full of tracking parameters, and instantly recognisable as monetised content. That recognition costs clicks. Cloaked links wrap your tracking URL inside a clean, branded short link on your own domain, with geo-targeting built in so the same shared URL can serve a US visitor differently from a UK visitor, and route everyone else to a sensible fallback. The link you share on social, in email, or in content stays the same; the offer behind it can change.

This is the workhorse feature for any publisher doing meaningful international traffic, running multiple licensed brands per market, or simply wanting their shared URLs to look professional instead of like a tracking pixel exploded inside an Excel cell.

Once you've set up a cloaked link, the following becomes available:

• Clean, shareable URLs like yourbrand.com/deals/summer-sale or go.yoursite.com/best-pick. No query strings, no affiliate parameters, no obvious tracking machinery visible to the visitor.
• Geo-targeting built in, with city, region, and country matching. The same URL can route US visitors to a US-licensed brand, UK visitors to a UK-licensed brand, EU visitors to an EU brand, and everyone else to a fallback offer.
• Clear priority order for overlapping rules. If you have both a country-level rule and a region-level rule that could match a visitor, the more specific match wins. The rules cascade predictably.
• One URL, many destinations: change the underlying offer at any time without ever updating the link you've shared. This matters when an offer is paused, the commercial terms change, or a better-converting alternative becomes available — the redirect updates automatically and the historical share continues working.
• Built-in attribution across all the routes a cloaked link can take. A click that lands on the US offer is tracked separately from a click that lands on the UK offer, so per-geo performance is visible in your reporting rather than collapsed into one undifferentiated bucket.

For publishers running regulated verticals (gambling, finance, health), the geo-targeting is what makes a single content asset compliant across jurisdictions. The same review article can link to one URL that serves the legally-correct brand for each visitor's location, instead of needing separate articles per market.

You create a cloaked link by choosing a path on one of your custom domains (e.g. yourbrand.com/deals/x), attaching one or more destination brand links, and defining which geo rule each destination serves. Visitors who hit the cloaked URL get matched against the rules in order — most specific first — and routed to the matching destination invisibly, in milliseconds.

A few specifics worth knowing:

• Geo data comes from a GeoIP database that's updated regularly. The accuracy is what you'd expect from IP-based geolocation: country-level is reliable, region-level is usually right, city-level can be off for users behind VPNs or large mobile carrier NATs.
• Fallback routing is mandatory. Every cloaked link needs a default destination that fires when no geo rule matches. This catches the edge cases (VPN users, unknown IPs, regions you haven't specifically targeted) so no visitor ever hits a dead URL.
• The redirect is HTTP 302 by default. That's the right choice for affiliate use cases because it doesn't get cached aggressively by browsers and respects future updates to the underlying offer.
• Cloaked links work alongside Routy's tracking — the click is recorded against the cloaked URL, the destination brand link, and the affiliate/source it came from, all in one event. You can report on cloaked-link performance the same way you report on direct brand links.

The clean-URL argument is real but it's the secondary case. The primary case is that any publisher running international traffic without geo-targeting is either leaving conversions on the table (sending US visitors to a UK-licensed brand that won't accept them) or carrying compliance risk (sending UK visitors to a US-only brand they shouldn't see). Cloaked links collapse both problems into a single feature: the URL you share is correct for every visitor's market, automatically.

The secondary case is operational. When the same shared URL can route to any number of destinations, you stop having to coordinate "please change the link in the email we sent last week" or "please update the bio link in our Instagram" every time a brand offer changes. The link stays. The destination updates. Your historical distribution keeps producing.

For affiliates running social, email, and content distribution at scale, this typically saves more time than any other operational feature in the platform.