2026-05-20 · 4 min read

Same short link. Different destination depending on who clicks it.

Routing rules let one link send phones to the App Store, desktops to your homepage, and Berlin visitors to the German landing page. Real examples inside.

Every short link has a default destination. Pro accounts can layer rules on top of that, evaluated in order, that send specific kinds of visitors elsewhere. It's not magic; every rule is just a tiny boolean check on the request, but it solves five problems that come up constantly.

Five things to do with routing rules

1) Send iOS visitors to the App Store and Android visitors to Play. The default falls through to your generic landing page for everything else.

2) Send German visitors to /de, Spanish visitors to /es, everyone else to /en. Set a default and let the rules narrow it down.

3) Send weekday-business-hours traffic to your shop and after-hours traffic to a contact form. (Yes, this works. Yes, we've used it.)

4) During a launch: send visitors before the launch hour to a countdown page, and after to the live product. One link, no swap-over moment, no broken share.

5) Send phone scans to a vCard-style contact card and desktop scans to your portfolio. The QR on your business card now does both jobs.

How the matcher works

Rules evaluate top-to-bottom. The first one whose conditions all match wins; if none match, the link falls through to its default long_url. Each condition is a simple equality check against the request: device kind (mobile / tablet / desktop), country code, weekday (Mon-Sun), or local hour bucket.

Everything happens at the redirect: we don't redirect to a script that decides; we decide in the same RPC that logs the click. One round-trip, sub-50ms at the edge.

What it can't do

• Identify the visitor. The request only knows IP, user-agent, and the timestamp. No login state, no per-user routing.
• A/B testing. There's no random bucket assignment. If you want 50/50 traffic split, you want a real experimentation tool, not us.
• Personalize the destination page itself. We redirect; what happens after the redirect is your destination's job.

Free plan?

Smart routing is a Pro feature. On Free, every link has exactly one destination. That's enough for most personal use; if you want the rules, $6/mo is the easiest upgrade story we've ever written.