Why Client-Side URL Tools Are Safer for Your Data
What happens to a sitemap or a URL list after you paste it into a free tool, why some of our tools can avoid the question entirely, and what the ones that cannot do instead.
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When you paste a client's URL list into a free bulk checker, that list is now on somebody else's server. The question worth asking before you do it is what happens next, and most tools do not answer it anywhere on the page.
Some free tools keep what you submit. A list of URLs someone bothered to check is a useful signal, and discovered-URL databases get sold.
Two architectures
A server-side tool receives your upload, stores it, processes it, and returns a result. Whatever you sent is now in their system, and their retention policy is whatever they say it is.
A client-side tool runs the logic in JavaScript on your own machine. The page does the work and shows the result. Nothing is transmitted, so there is nothing to retain.
Two of our six URL tools work the second way. The URL Analyzer and the UTM Builder parse and assemble strings, which a browser can do unaided, so what you paste into them does not leave the tab.
What the other four do
The Redirect Detector, Bulk URL Checker, Sitemap URL Extractor and Sitemap Error Checker all have to fetch a page that is not ours. A browser is not permitted to read another site's response directly, so there is no client-side version of these. The request goes through our server.
What we do with it: the server makes the request, returns the status, and keeps nothing. There is no database of checked URLs and no log we mine for our own research.
That is a promise rather than a proof, which is why every one of those four tools carries a SERVER FETCH label next to the button that does the work. You should know which kind of tool you are using before you press it, on this site and on any other.
When it actually matters
Unreleased pages. If you are checking staging URLs or landing pages that have not launched, a tool that stores what it sees can put them in a public index before you announce them.
Client work under NDA. Agencies sign agreements about where client data goes. "I pasted the site structure into a free tool" is not usually covered by them.
Speed, incidentally. Local processing skips the upload and the queue. For a long list that is the difference between instant and waiting.
The thing to check
Not our claims. Any tool's. Before you paste something you would not publish, look for a statement on the page about where the input goes. If there isn't one, the honest assumption is that it goes to a server, and you have no idea what happens after that.
Our six are listed on the URL Tools page, each marked with which of the two it is.