https://www.yahoo.com/news/example-article-031500636.html
After LinkCleanhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/example-article-031500636.html
guccounter
What is guccounter in a Yahoo link?
Where they come from
An AdGuard report shows the path: Yahoo's consent page, consent.yahoo.com/collectConsent, carries a .done= address, and the article it sends you to on Engadget arrives with guccounter=1 and guce_referrer parameters added.
A Brave browser issue from September 2022 collected live examples: a yahoo.com news article with all three, engadget.com/?guccounter=1, and de.yahoo.com/?p=us&guccounter=1. Yahoo publishes no description of the names that this page could find.
What guce_referrer reveals
In the Brave example the value is aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuemlsbW9uZXkuY29tLw. That is base64, and decoded it reads https://www.zilmoney.com/: a web address. Together with the name, that makes it the page the reader arrived from. The reading is an inference, but the decoding is not.
So a Yahoo article link copied with guce_referrer attached tells whoever you send it to where you were before you opened it. guce_referrer_sig beside it is a long opaque value, and the name suggests a signature for the referrer; that is also an inference. In every example collected here, guccounter is 1.
How LinkClean removes them
Default-on and global, all three names. The article is addressed by its path, so the link works without them. AdGuard's filter and Brave strip them everywhere, and ClearURLs strips them on TechCrunch links.
Frequently asked
What does guccounter=1 mean?
Yahoo has not said. It appears after Yahoo's consent page has sent you on to the article, and in every example collected here its value is 1.
What is in guce_referrer?
A base64-encoded web address. Decoded, it reads as the page you came from before the Yahoo or Engadget article; that reading is an inference from the name and the value.
Is it safe to remove them?
Yes. The article is addressed by the path and loads the same without them.
Clean tracking on iPhone, in one tap.
LinkClean strips 250+ vendor-specific tracking parameters from any link, from any app's share sheet — and preserves functional ones like hl, t (YouTube timestamp), and q (search). No account, on-device.
