A Brave feature worth revisiting: the one-click 'clean link' trick

I’ve only recently switched to Brave, and I’ll admit something a little embarrassing. For years I’ve been that person who copies a link, then sits there deleting the messy string of characters tacked onto the end before sending it to anyone. You know the bit I mean. The ‎’?si=’ on a YouTube share, the ‎‘utm_’ tags, all the tracking junk that piggybacks on a URL. I never once stopped to check whether my browser could just handle it for me. Turns out Brave has been able to do exactly that, and I only found out because the company posted about it.

The feature is called ‘Copy clean link’, and it does what the name suggests. Instead of hitting the usual copy option, you right-click a link and pick ‘Copy clean link’ instead.

If you want to share a clean link with friends, we make that easy too.

Just right-click the link (long-press on mobile) and choose “Copy clean link” to copy it to your clipboard without the tracking parameters. 🪄 pic.twitter.com/BNJeJ7rLAx

— Brave (@brave) July 21, 2026

On mobile, you long-press. Brave then strips out the tracking parameters and hands you a tidy URL that still works perfectly fine. The site loads the same way, minus the stuff that’s there to follow you around.

According to Brave’s own help page, this builds on something the browser was already doing quietly in the background. The company says it “already implemented a query string filter which helps prevent tracking of individual users,” and Copy clean link takes that a step further by letting you “remove any clutter or unneeded clutter from links.” So even before you clean a link by hand, Brave has been trimming known trackers when you visit a page.

If you like these kinds of small, practical touches, Brave has been on a bit of a roll lately. I recently wrote about how Brave now lets you force the right-click menu open on sites that block it, which pairs nicely with its Force Paste option. The browser has also been busy on the bigger stuff, and you can now try tree-style tab stacking on the stable version if you enable a flag.

You can also grab a clean link straight from the share menu in the address bar if right-clicking isn’t your thing. Either way, it’s the kind of feature that quietly saves you a few seconds every time you share something. I just wish I’d known about it before I spent all those years scrubbing links by hand.

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