wbraid?Google Ads attribution tokens invented for iPhone traffic after Apple's privacy rules blocked gclid, wbraid for web campaigns and gbraid for app campaigns.
This page covers both parameters: wbraid (web-to-app measurement) and gbraid (app-to-web measurement).
When Apple shipped App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 in 2021, click-level identifiers like gclid stopped being viable for traffic touching iOS apps. Google's answer was a pair of new tokens: wbraid on clicks measured web-side and gbraid on clicks measured app-side.
Google describes them as privacy-centric because reporting is aggregated and modeled rather than tied to a single user. The token still identifies a click event to Google's systems, still rides in your URL, still lands in logs and pasted links, and still exists for exactly one purpose: reporting your behavior on the destination back to Google's ad machinery.
Yes. Like gclid, these are attribution-only tokens. The destination page renders identically without them; only Google's modeled conversion counts are affected.
Rather's Link Shortener strips wbraid and hundreds of parameters like it, right in the address bar and in everything you copy or share. Free, open source, no account, no data collection, and the page you are on never breaks: the cleanup happens after the site has already loaded.