Why RevealURL exists
A free, ad-free tool for anyone who wants to know where a link really leads before clicking it. No account, no tracking, no catch.
Offered freely by EarthBeLost
RevealURL is a community tool provided at no cost by EarthBeLost. There are no advertisements, no paid tiers, no data sold to third parties, and no account required to use any feature on this site. We believe that basic online safety tools should be accessible to everyone, without barriers or hidden costs.
An experiment in AI assisted development
This project began as a practical test of what Claude AI could do when given a real, production-quality open source codebase. The goal was to find out whether an AI could genuinely read and understand existing code, identify areas for improvement, write meaningful enhancements, and produce a more capable and polished end result. The answer turned out to be a confident yes, and what you are using right now is the outcome of that experiment.
Starting from the original URL Expander project, Claude AI analysed the entire codebase, suggested structural improvements, rewrote components for clarity and consistency, expanded the threat checking capabilities from one database to six, and ensured a unified design across every page. The process demonstrated that AI can serve as a genuine collaborator in software development, not just a code generator, but a thoughtful reviewer and improver of work that already exists.
What was changed and improved
The original project provided a solid foundation: URL expansion, Google Safe Browsing integration, and a clean Next.js structure. Building on that base, this version adds URLhaus, PhishTank, AbuseIPDB, AlienVault OTX, and VirusTotal threat database checks running in parallel. It also introduces SSL certificate analysis, DNS fast-flux detection, domain age lookups, Wayback Machine history checks, typosquatting detection, IDN homograph detection, and a detailed content phishing signals analyser.
Beyond the threat engine, the interface was redesigned with a consistent dark theme across all pages, a QR code scanner, a clipboard URL detector, a bulk checker for up to ten URLs at once, an email scanner, a local history panel, and a redirect journey visualiser. The codebase was also refactored for maintainability, with shared components, module level constants, and a unified timeout helper replacing repeated boilerplate throughout the API.
Original Source Code
RevealURL is built on top of URL Expander by Sourav Dutta, released under the MIT License. In accordance with that licence, we gratefully acknowledge Sourav Dutta as the original author and link to the upstream repository here.
The MIT License is a permissive open source licence that allows anyone to use, copy, modify, and distribute the software, including for commercial purposes, provided the original copyright notice is preserved. The full text of the licence is available in the original repository linked above.
We encourage anyone interested in the original project or in building their own URL safety tools to visit Sourav's repository directly. His work provided the foundation that made this project possible.
Privacy and Your Data
We take privacy seriously because this tool exists specifically to help people avoid clicking on links from untrusted sources. The people who most need a URL safety checker are often the same people who are already cautious about who they share their data with. It would be contradictory to build a privacy protection tool that itself collected and monetised user data.
Beyond principle, we have no commercial reason to collect your data. RevealURL is offered freely with no advertising and no investor pressure to grow a user database. That freedom lets us design the tool around what is right for you rather than what is profitable for us.
For the full technical breakdown of exactly what is processed, which third-party services are contacted, and what your rights are, see our Privacy Policy.