Hide a partner smart link's real address from the visitor

When a button opens a partner-network smart link, the plain behavior is a direct redirect to the partner's own domain — which means that domain briefly appears in the visitor's browser history and network tab. The relay proxy hides it: the visitor's browser only ever talks to your own domain, and the hop to the partner's server happens server-side, invisibly.

How it works

With the relay proxy enabled, a partner smart-link click goes through /go/<id> on your own domain instead of jumping straight to the partner's host:

1. Your server fetches the partner's redirect endpoint itself, forwarding the visitor's real User-Agent and IP so the partner's own bot filter sees a normal visit and returns its real destination (not its bot-filtered homepage).
2. Your server reads the destination the partner handed back and 307-redirects the visitor there directly — the partner's intermediate domain is never in the chain the visitor sees.

A bot or a datacenter/cloud IP hitting /go/<id> gets a quiet empty response instead — no fetch to the partner, no info leaked either way.

Automatic fallback

If the partner's server errors, times out, or doesn't return a redirect at all, the request falls back to sending the visitor straight to the partner's URL directly — the link still works, it's just momentarily less hidden. This is a resilience path, not a configuration you need to manage: the route is built to never fail closed on a partner outage.

What's next

Looking for the equivalent protection on your own smart links rather than a partner's? See Hide content buttons from bots and ad reviewers.