Expand an ow.ly link

Paste an ow.ly or ht.ly link to see where it really goes. Expanded on our server, so nothing from the destination reaches your browser.

What you get back

An ow.ly address carries no information about its destination. That is the entire point of a shortener. Expanding it here returns the final URL, every hop taken to reach it with the status code at each step, and warnings worth having: a downgrade to plain http, several shorteners stacked on top of each other, or a destination that answers with an error rather than a page.

The last of those is the common case with older social posts. A campaign link from two years ago may still resolve perfectly at the shortener and land on a page that has since been deleted. A checker that reports only the first status calls that healthy, because the shortener genuinely did its job. You need the status at the end of the chain.

ow.ly and ht.ly are the same service

Hootsuite operates both domains, so ht.ly links expand exactly the same way and can be pasted above without changing anything. If you are cataloguing links across a set of social accounts, treat the two as one service rather than two.

A note on tracking parameters

Shortened marketing links usually carry campaign parameters on the destination utm_source, utm_campaign and friends, which the short form hides along with everything else. The expansion shows them, which is useful in both directions: it tells you how a post was tagged, and it tells you what would be appended to your visit if you clicked.

Frequently asked questions

What is an ow.ly link?
ow.ly is Hootsuite's link shortener. When someone composes or schedules a social post in Hootsuite and includes a URL, Hootsuite can rewrite it to an ow.ly address so clicks can be counted against that post. ht.ly is the same service under a second domain. Because Hootsuite is used heavily by brand and agency accounts, ow.ly links turn up most often in scheduled marketing posts.

Is ow.ly still working, or was it shut down?
Hootsuite's own product page still presents Ow.ly as a current feature, checked on 23 August 2026. Several third-party articles claim it was retired, but each of those we found was published by a competing link shortener, and we could not verify the claim against anything Hootsuite publishes. Rather than pick a side: paste the link above. If it resolves you will see the destination and the full chain, and if it no longer resolves you will see the error instead. That settles it for your specific link, which is the only answer that matters.

Why would I want to expand one?
Usually one of three reasons. You want to know where a link in a marketing post actually goes before clicking. You are auditing your own site or social posts and need the real destinations rather than a list of ow.ly addresses. Or a link has stopped working and you need to know whether the shortener is failing or the page at the far end is gone, which are different problems with different fixes, and a chain showing every hop tells them apart.

Will expanding it count as a click in someone's analytics?
It may. A shortener records a hit when its redirect is requested, and expanding a link necessarily requests it. What it will not do is identify you: the request comes from our server, so your IP address, browser and cookies are not involved. If avoiding a recorded hit matters more than knowing the destination, do not expand the link at all. No tool can read a redirect without following it.