Straight 302, no interstitial ads — and why

GlaCat short links always redirect with a plain HTTP 302 straight to the destination. Visitors never pass through an ad page or a countdown screen — and you can verify this yourself with any HTTP tool.

Verify it yourself

Do not take marketing copy on trust. Run the following against any GlaCat short link. The response is a single 302 status with a Location header pointing straight at the original destination — there is no intermediate page:

curl -I https://glacat.com/your-code

An interstitial shortener answers this same request with a 200 and an HTML page: the visitor has to sit through an ad and wait for a countdown before reaching the destination.

Why this matters

Ad interstitials cost the person sharing the link in three concrete ways: lost visitors (one extra click and a five-second wait is enough for people to give up), lost trust (interstitials are routinely mistaken for scams or malicious redirects), and brand damage (you have no control over which ads appear on that page). The added latency is felt most on mobile.

GlaCat performs the redirect at the edge node closest to the visitor, and click statistics are written asynchronously in the background so they never slow the redirect down. Because the redirect never renders a page, visitors also never load any third-party tracking script.

What exactly is promised, and how this is funded

Being precise beats making slogans, so here is the exact scope of the promise: GlaCat guarantees that the redirect path carries no advertising. Clicking a GlaCat short link is always a straight 302 — never an interstitial, a countdown, or any intermediate page. That does not change with our financial situation.

GlaCat runs on free cloud tiers with generous limits, so operating costs are currently close to zero, and there are no ads anywhere on the site today. If we ever place advertising on GlaCat's own web pages (the pages where links are created) to cover costs, that would sit on the creator's side of the product and would still not change what happens when a visitor clicks a short link.

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