Referer Reality

# Referer reality Source: [https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/referer/](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/referer/) May 10, 2026Chris Morgan is[tired of people tacking query strings](https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings)onto hisURLs —e\.g\.`www\.robinsloan\.com/lab/?like=this&and=this`—so he’s con­fig­ured his web­site to reject those requests outright, rather than suffer in silence\. Naturally, any­body is free to set up their server in any way they like … however, Chris writes this: > If I wanted to know \[where a vis­itor came from\] I’d look at the Ref­erer header; and if it isn’t there, it’s prob­ably for a good reason\. which isn’t really true anymore\. For most web­sites, themajority —not just the plurality, but themajority —of vis­itors arrive by fol­lowing a link inside an email or an app \(e\.g\. Instagram, Mes­sages on iOS, the Sub­stack app\), nei­ther of which set a`Ref­erer`header; so, all of those vis­itors are lumped into a vast slab called*Direct*or*Unknown*\. This broken mech­a­nism pro­vides the impetus for the custom query string I append to all out­going links,`utm\_source=Robin\_Sloan\_sent\_me`: under­standing that many/most clicks on links I share will come from my email newsletter, I want the source to be legible, par­tic­u­larly in con­texts such as, e\.g\., Shopify\. This isn’t an argu­ment that Chris Morgan should do any­thingdifferent —opinionated oper­ator deci­sions make the internet goround —but rather an oppor­tu­nity for clar­i­fi­ca­tion about the cur­rent state of play\. I don’t col­lect or review ana­lytics of any kind on my web­sites, so I’m not a con­sumer of this kind of referral info\. Even so, my custom query string is, in my calculation, an expres­sion of dig­ital etiquette: rather than dump a load of anony­mous traffic on your doorstep, I reveal who’s linking, so a web­site or online shop oper­ator can trace it back and get in touch, if wanted or needed\. \(Memorably, this was useful when the[Abrams Planetarium](https://abramsplanetarium.natsci.msu.edu/sky-calendar/index.aspx?utm_source=Robin_Sloan_sent_me)received a wave of new sub­scrip­tions and weren’t sure if they were legitimate; a brief email cor­re­spon­dence assured them that yes, these people were real … they were nerdy … they wanted the Sky Calendar\!\) Note that a handful of sites do choke on unex­pected query strings, including YouTube \(\!\), so I main­tain a list of exceptions, to which`chrismorgan\.info`is now added\. [To the blog home page](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/)