What is LNKS GD in Google Analytics?

If you've spent any time looking at your Google Analytics referral traffic, you might have seen a peculiar source show up: lnks gd. Seeing a mysterious referrer can be worrying, leading you to wonder if it's spam or something you need to block. This article will show you what lnks gd is, why you're seeing it, and how to analyze it.

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What Exactly is "lnks gd"?

In short, lnks gd is referral traffic from links clicked inside Google Drive documents. It's not spam. The name itself is just a shortened version of "links" and "Google Drive." When someone includes a hyperlink to your website in a Google Doc, Google Sheet, or Google Slides presentation and a user clicks it, Google Analytics sometimes attributes that visit to lnks gd as the referrer.

This is an intermediate redirect service, similar to how Twitter uses t.co and Facebook uses l.facebook.com. Instead of passing the specific document URL as the referrer (for privacy and security reasons), Google routes the click through its own shortened domain to track the origin as coming from its ecosystem.

So, whenever you see traffic from lnks gd, it means a real person found a link to your website inside a document hosted on Google Drive and clicked on it.

Common Scenarios for "lnks gd" Referrals

This traffic can come from countless sources, but most fall into a few common categories. Understanding these scenarios can help you pinpoint where your links might be getting shared.

• Internal Company Documents: An employee might share a project plan as a Google Doc that links to a resource page on your corporate website. When team members click that link, the traffic could be reported as lnks gd.
• External Reports and Whitepapers: If your team creates a detailed report or resource guide and shares access to the public via a Google Doc, any outbound links to your site that get clicked will probably appear under this source.
• Educational Materials: A professor could create a Google Slides presentation for a lecture that includes a link to one of your blog posts as a recommended reading. Students clicking that link would generate lnks gd referral traffic.
• Personal or Collaborative Spreadsheets: Someone might keep a list of useful industry articles in a Google Sheet for their own reference. If one of your articles is on that list, every click from that sheet could be another visit from lnks gd.

Basically, any time a link to your site is shared in the Google Drive ecosystem, there’s a chance its clicks will be tracked this way.

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Is "lnks gd" Traffic Good or Bad?

In almost every case, traffic from lnks gd is legitimate, human-driven traffic. It is not the same as referral spam from ghost bots or low-quality crawlers that you might want to filter out of your reports.

The clearest way to confirm this is to look at the engagement metrics for that traffic source in Google Analytics.

How to Check Traffic Quality in Google Analytics 4

1. Navigate to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition.
2. In the table, you'll see a list of traffic sources. Find the search bar at the top right of the table and type in lnks gd.
3. Look at key metrics for that traffic source, like Engaged sessions, Average engagement time, and Conversions.

If you see healthy numbers — people staying on your site for a reasonable amount of time, multiple sessions, and maybe even a few conversions — you can be confident it's real users who are interested in your content. Referral spam, on the other hand, typically has engagement times of zero and an engagement rate near 0% because the bots don't actually interact with your site.

How to Better Understand Your "lnks gd" Traffic

While lnks gd isn't harmful, knowing which pages are being linked to can provide valuable insights into how your content is being used and shared. The most effective way to do this is to add a secondary dimension to your traffic report in Google Analytics.

Finding the Landing Page in GA4

Once you've isolated your lnks gd traffic using the steps above, you can find out which specific pages are receiving these visits.

1. Follow the steps in the previous section to filter your Traffic acquisition report to show only the Session source for lnks gd.
2. Click the plus sign (+) next to the primary dimension (in this case, Session source).
3. In the search box that appears, search for and select Landing page + query string.

The report will now show you a breakdown of all the pages on your site that people have landed on from Google Drive links. This can be incredibly useful. You might discover:

• A specific blog post is frequently cited in educational documents.
• A product page is included in a partner’s planning document.
• An old article is still being passed around and driving traffic.

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The Frustrating Part: Pinpointing the Exact Document

Here’s the biggest challenge: Google Analytics does not tell you the URL of the specific document driving the traffic. For privacy reasons, you can’t see the exact Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide that contains the link.

This means you have to do a little detective work based on context:

• Analyze the Landing Page: Look at the landing pages that get the most lnks gd traffic. If you see a pricing page getting clicks, for instance, it might be linked from an internal budget spreadsheet or a sales proposal someone is building.
• Think in 'Context': Did you recently send a pitch deck to a potential client via Google Slides? Have you been collaborating with a partner using a shared Google Doc? Big spikes in referral traffic from lnks gd often correspond to an offline event.
• Look Inbound Links (Beyond GA): Sometimes a simple Google search using your landing page URL can uncover public-facing Google Docs. Try searching with a query like `https://yourwebsite.com/the-landing-page` to find web pages that directly link to that URL. One of them might be a publicly shared Google Drive document.

The Proactive Solution: UTM Tagging

While you can't control links others share, you can control the links you share yourself. For any links to your website that you place within a Google Drive document, the best practice is to use UTM campaign parameters. UTM tags are simple snippets added to the end of a URL to help you track the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns.

A UTM-tagged link looks like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/resource-page?utm_source=google_drive&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=q4_partner_report

Here's what each part does:

• utm_source: The platform the traffic is coming from (e.g., google_drive).
• utm_medium: The marketing channel (e.g., referral or ebook).
• utm_campaign: The name of your specific campaign or document (e.g., q4_partner_report). You can use a more descriptive name, like ‘SaaS Agency Report,’ and track its performance in real-time.

When someone clicks from that specific tagged document, that visit will be attributed exactly as you've defined it in your UTMs, not bucketed into the generic "lnks gd" referral source. This gives you much clearer, more actionable data on how the content you create translates into website traffic.

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Should You Block "lnks gd" in GA?

No, you absolutely should not. Because lnks gd is real user traffic, filtering it out of your reporting would give you an incomplete and inaccurate picture of your audience. You would essentially be deleting data from real visitors. The goal should be to understand the traffic, not pretend it doesn't exist. The only referrers you should be blocking are known spam domains that are clearly filling up your account with fake hits.

Final Thoughts

In the end, lnks gd is a pretty straightforward referral source. It means someone found your content valuable enough to include in a Google Drive document and share it with their internal team members or clients. Rather than a source of concern, it’s a sign that your content has an organic reach even in private, "dark social" spaces like workflows or shared assets in a cloud.

Tracking this kind of thing is exactly why we built Graphed. Instead of piecing together clues from traffic sources across a dozen platforms, we make it seamless to connect data from tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM and start answering your questions for your next investor update or your regular business health checkup. Using natural language, your business users — not just tech teams — can ask for a dashboard showing year-over-year revenue, or a chart breaking down user demographics from your highest-performing Facebook Ads campaigns. Our AI and the rest of our platform create a unified, real-time dashboard, transforming data from sources across all of those services (and Salesforce) from mere noise into actionable, single-source-of-truth insights.