URL Extractor

How the URL extractor works

The URL extractor looks for links in three ways. First it reads href and src attributes in HTML, so links in anchors, images, scripts and stylesheets are all found, and relative paths such as /blog/post/ or ../img/a.png are resolved against the base URL you enter. Then it finds every http:// and https:// address in plain text. Finally, with Include www.example.com ticked, it also catches addresses typed without a protocol.

Trailing punctuation that ends a sentence is trimmed, & in HTML is decoded to &, and invalid addresses are dropped. Every URL is normalised by the browser's own URL parser, so the output is always well formed.

Output formats and clean-up options

Remove query strings and fragments keeps only the clean page address. Remove only UTM and click IDs keeps meaningful parameters like ?page=2 but strips utm_, gclid, fbclid, msclkid and similar tracking codes. Only URLs containing filters by any text, such as /blog/, .pdf or a domain.

What people use a link extractor for

• SEO audits: pull every link from a page's source, then check them all with the HTTP status code checker.
• Backlink research: extract domains from an export or a list of mentions.
• Content migration: list every image and internal link in an article before moving it.
• Chat and email: collect all links shared in a long conversation or newsletter.
• Clean sharing: strip tracking codes before posting or storing links.
• Sitemaps: extract page URLs from HTML, then build a sitemap with the XML sitemap generator.

Tips for extracting links

To get every link from a live web page, open it in your browser, press Ctrl+U (or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view the source, select all, copy and paste here with the page address as the base URL. Pasting the visible page text instead only finds links that are written out in full.

For a server-side check of every link on a page, including whether each one works, use the broken link checker. To decode links that are percent-encoded or wrapped in redirect URLs, use the URL decoder. To pull email addresses from the same text, use the email extractor.

All extraction happens in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded.

URL extractor examples

Here is how the extractor handles a typical mixed paste. Given this input:

Read our guide at https://example.com/guide?utm_source=mail, or the PDF at www.example.org/files/report.pdf.
<a href="/pricing/">Pricing</a> <img src="../img/logo.png">

with the base URL https://example.com/blog/post/ and Remove only UTM and click IDs ticked, the output is:

https://example.com/pricing/
https://example.com/blog/img/logo.png
https://example.com/guide
https://www.example.org/files/report.pdf

The relative /pricing/ and ../img/logo.png links were resolved against the base URL exactly the way a browser would resolve them, the tracking parameter was removed, the trailing comma and full stop were trimmed from the plain-text links, and the bare www. address gained https://. Switch the output to Domains only and the same input gives just example.com and www.example.org.

Two details are worth knowing. Links inside JavaScript code or JSON are found only when they are written out in full with http or https. And protocol-relative links such as //cdn.example.com/app.js are resolved using the protocol of your base URL, so always enter the base URL with https:// when you work with HTML source.

URL Extractor: frequently asked questions