Google's ad-click URL parameters, explained (gclid, gad_source, gbraid…)

The family at a glance

A single Google ad click can land you on a URL with three or four of these stacked together — ?gclid=…&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=…. Each is added automatically by Google Ads' auto-tagging; you don't have to be the advertiser for them to appear. Here's the whole family:

gclid — the click ID everything else orbits

gclid (Google Click Identifier) is the oldest and most important member of the family. With auto-tagging on (the default for almost every Google Ads account), every paid click gets a unique gclid appended to the landing-page URL. Google Ads and GA4 read it back to credit the conversion: this exact click, from this ad, in this campaign, led to this purchase.

Because it's per-click and unique, gclid is the most identifying parameter in the set — it ties your visit to a specific ad impression Google served you. It's also the hardest term to rank for and the one people most want gone. Full detail on its own page: What is gclid?.

gbraid and wbraid — the privacy-era twins

When Apple's App Tracking Transparency (iOS 14.5, 2021) and Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention made the cookie-and-gclid plumbing unreliable on iPhones, Google introduced two replacements designed to measure conversions in aggregate rather than per person:

• gbraid rides app→web journeys — you tap an ad inside an iOS app and land on a website.
• wbraid rides web→web journeys on iOS Safari — you click an ad on one page and land on another.

Why gbraid and wbraid are different from gclid

Both are engineered to be more privacy-preserving than gclid — they're meant to be joined in aggregate, not used to single you out — but they're still attribution tokens the destination page never reads, so LinkClean strips them too. Their own pages: gbraid · wbraid.

gad_source — the source code Google won't explain

gad_source is the parameter people search for most in this family, because it shows up as a bare number — gad_source=1, gad_source=2, gad_source=7 — with no obvious meaning. Google's own help page is blunt: the parameter "is used to identify the source of ads URLs" and "isn't customizable," but Google does not publish what the individual numbers mean.

Analysts have reverse-engineered the common values by correlating them with campaign types. The mapping below is community-observed and stable over time, but it is not official — treat it as a strong hint, not a guarantee:

So what does gad_source=7 mean?

If you landed here searching exactly that: the honest answer is that no one outside Google has confirmed it. The low values (1, 2, 3, 5) line up with Search, Display, YouTube and Shopping; everything above that is guesswork. Either way, the number is metadata for Google's analytics — the page you're visiting doesn't read it, and removing it changes nothing about what loads. Its own page: What is gad_source?.

gad_campaignid — the numeric campaign tag

gad_campaignid arrived in 2023 alongside gad_source. It's the numeric ID of the Google Ads campaign that produced the click — a machine-readable companion to the human-readable utm_campaign a marketer types. A single ad URL often carries all three campaign signals at once: utm_campaign for the GA4 dashboard, gad_campaignid for Google's first-party attribution, and gclid for the Ads conversion record. What is gad_campaignid?

Why Google needs so many

It looks redundant — why four or five tags for one click? The answer is the privacy transition. Universal Analytics leaned on third-party cookies and referrer headers to attribute traffic. Safari's ITP, Firefox's Total Cookie Protection and Chrome's Privacy Sandbox have eroded both. GA4's design moved the attribution signal into the URL itself as durable first-party tags — which is exactly why the gad_* family appeared in 2023 and why gbraid/wbraid appeared in 2021. They're the cookie's replacement, stapled to the link.

For the difference between these click IDs and the utm_* tags marketers add by hand, see Click IDs vs UTM tags.

Are any of them safe to keep?

Functionally, none of them matter to you. Every parameter in this family is read by Google's ad and analytics systems, never by the destination server — strip them and the page loads byte-for-byte the same. (The general principle: Do cleaned links still work?)

The only party with a reason to keep them is the advertiser measuring their own campaign. If that's you, paste the link into LinkClean rather than cleaning blind — you'll see the original and cleaned versions side by side and can keep whichever you intend to share.

How LinkClean removes the whole family

All seven parameters ship in LinkClean's catalog as default-on, host-independent rules — there's no legitimate non-tracking use of gclid, gad_source and the rest, so they're stripped wherever they appear, on every surface (Share Sheet, widget, Shortcuts, the app, QR). A messy Google-ad URL like https://shop.example.com/p?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12345678&gclid=Cj0KCQ&utm_campaign=spring comes out as https://shop.example.com/p.

Because these rules aren't host-scoped (unlike X's t=/s=, which only apply on x.com), you don't have to think about it — the family is gone the moment you clean.