Custom domain

A custom domain, also called a branded domain, is a name you own that serves your short links in place of the platform's shared one: go.brand.com/x7Kp2 rather than a generic shortener address. The links, their codes and their statistics are unchanged; only the hostname in front of them differs.

Connecting one is a DNS exercise. A subdomain is pointed at the platform with a CNAME record; a bare domain cannot take a CNAME and needs an ALIAS record or address records instead. A verification record proves you control the name, and the HTTPS certificate is issued and renewed for you once that check passes.

There are two reasons to bother. Recipients decide whether to click on what they can see, and a familiar name in a message reads differently from an unknown one. And reputation on a shared shortener is collective: filters that judge a domain by everyone's traffic judge yours by it too. The usual setup error is choosing a hostname that already serves something else, because a CNAME cannot share a name with any other record.