Short links are one of the most abused shapes on the web: a redirect endpoint that forwards visitors somewhere else is exactly what bots, scrapers, and fraud crawlers want to reach and abuse. XAntiBot's protected short links flip that around — every visitor is verified before the redirect happens, on your own domain.
How protection works
When someone opens one of your protected short links, the gateway sends the visitor's signals to XAntiBot and enforces the returned decision before anything else happens:
- Real visitors are redirected to the destination immediately.
- Suspicious visitors receive a challenge and must pass it before the redirect.
- Bots and unwanted crawlers are blocked and never see the destination.
Each link carries its own protection settings, so one campaign can stay strict while another stays frictionless.
Creating a protected short link
- Open Dashboard → Short links and create the link: pick your destination and a name.
- Choose the per-link protection rules (for example: block datacenter traffic, challenge unknown browsers).
- Share the short link. Every visit is verified on your own domain.
Visit analytics are tracked per link, so you can see how much automated traffic was filtered out.
Why protect a redirect at all?
- Affiliate and campaign links stay clean of bot clicks.
- Limited offers are not probed by automation.
- Your domain reputation is not spent forwarding traffic to scrapers.
Combine with the rest of the platform
Short-link protection uses the same detection core as the rest of XAntiBot: the real-time check returns a score and an action, the network signals classify the visitor connection, and your custom rules tune the enforcement. Read the API documentation for the decision contract, the features overview for everything included, or the pricing for the plan limits.