https://www.google.com/search
After LinkCleanhttps://www.google.com/search?q=link+cleaner
sca_esv
What is sca_esv?
What sca_esv looks like
It appears in the address bar after you search, refine a search, or switch between tabs like Images and News: …/search?q=link+cleaner&sca_esv=5a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b&…. The value is a short opaque token. The examples people posted when it first appeared in 2023 were plain numbers; the ones seen since are longer hexadecimal strings.
You do not add it and the page you searched for does not need it. Google's own front end attaches it as you move around the results.
What it means: nobody outside Google knows
Google publishes no specification for sca_esv. Everything here is observed behaviour or the work of people who decoded it, not a documented contract. The Google search URL overview covers the rest of the session keys.
The guesses in circulation — that it identifies an experiment, or a search session — are guesses. What can be said is narrower and more useful: privacy projects that maintain URL-cleaning rules, including Brave and ClearURLs, treat it as a tracking parameter, and nobody has found a search that changes when it is removed.
Why it ends up in links you share
A product page or an article has its own address. A search result page does not — the only way to send someone a search is to copy the results URL, and that URL carries the whole session tail with it: sca_esv, ved, ei, and from Chrome rlz and gs_lcrp.
The search itself is one parameter, q=. Everything else in that tail describes you and your session, not the thing you wanted to share.
How LinkClean removes it
Default-on, and scoped to Google's search domains (google.com and the main country domains). The same letters on any other site are left alone, and q=, tbm=, udm= and hl= — the parts that decide what the search shows — are never touched.
Frequently asked
Is there official Google documentation for sca_esv?
No. Google has not published a help page, a developer reference or a statement about it. Descriptions of sca_esv — including this one — are observation, not specification.
Does removing sca_esv change the search results?
No. The query is carried by q=, and the result type by tbm= or udm=. Delete sca_esv, reload, and the same results page loads.
Does sca_esv identify me?
Unknown. Its value is opaque and Google has not said what it encodes. That uncertainty is the reason to remove it from a link you send to someone else: you cannot tell what you are forwarding.
Why doesn't LinkClean strip sca_esv on every site?
Because the rule is scoped to where the name is known to mean something. sca_esv has only been seen on Google's search domains, so that is where LinkClean removes it.
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.
