The Ultimate Guide to Go Links

Think of all the time you’ve spent trying to remember where to find a particular resource you need for your job. Maybe it's a project plan, or your team's travel booking process. Is that page in Google Docs? Or was it Notion? Coda? Perhaps it was a link sent to you in Slack or via email.

There’s a better way to keep track of all the links you use and it’s called go links.

Go links take the all-too-familiar-situation above and simplify it into remembering one link:

go/code      go/review       go/notion      go/OKRs

Boom.

You don’t need to remember which tool you use—all you need to know is that you want to book travel. Type that simple phrase into your web browser and let the go link fairies take you to where you need to go.

Go links are short, memorable URLs that help your team instantly find internal tools, documents, and resources. Instead of hunting through bookmarks or Slack threads, just type go/keyword and you're there.

Here’s other scenarios for when go links come in handy:

• Where do I submit expenses? Easy: go/expenses and you’re on your way to getting your money back.
• Your company has multiple tools for managing HR benefits, which one has information about maternity leave? Simple: go/maternity-leave and you’re family planning.
• It can also be a resource that you use every day. Instead of clicking through your favorites or typing in github.com/trotto and navigating to your repo, just type in go/code or go/issues to quickly get to the right place.

Using go links makes navigating your tools and resources as simple as remembering a few intuitive words.

Countless people and companies have integrated go links into their daily workflow and generally it comes down to: 

• Memorability of links
• Ease of use
• Standardization of links
• Discoverability of new links
• Security and analysis

Go links — also written as go/links, golinks, or go-links — are a type of internal URL shortening system controlled by an organization. They replace long, forgettable URLs with short, human-readable links that anyone on the team can remember and share.

The concept originated at Google, where an engineer named Eric DeFriez built the first go links system in 2006 to help Googlers find internal resources faster. The idea was simple: instead of circulating a long Google Docs URL, you could just say "go to go/roadmap" in a meeting, and everyone could access it.

Since then, go links have been adopted by companies like Netflix, Stripe, Figma, Slack, and thousands of other organizations. They've become a standard productivity tool at companies that value fast, frictionless access to information.

With Trotto, any team can set up go links in minutes — for free. Just install the Chrome extension, sign in with your work email, and start creating links like go/handbook, go/roadmap, or go/onboarding.

For example, you could create a go link to turn the link for your team’s weekly meeting agenda from an ugly URL like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwzya-blahblahblah

Into this:

go/weeklymeeting

Go links are typically private to the organization, meaning that members of the organization—company, school, etc—need to sign in or be on a secure network in order to use their organization’s go links. We make it easy to stay secure and you can self-serve: learn more about getting started.

Recommended reading: What are go links?

Go links are often confused with the links created using URL shortening services like Bitly, but they are used for different reasons. Both bit.ly links and go links are ways to shorten long, complicated links but bit.ly is used mainly for public links and go/ links are used for internal private links. Bit.ly is used to simplify links to public URLs you send externally to your customers or audience, whereas go/ links are used to simplify private links internal and only accessible within a company or organization.

Bit.ly and other public URL shorteners are an external marketing tool whereas go links are an internal productivity tool.

A typical use case for Bitly (or other link shorteners) is to make long links look nicer on social media posts, marketing emails, flyers, printed marketing material or anything you’re sending to a public audience. Public link shorteners like bit.ly will often generate a random alphanumeric sequence to shorten the URL.

Go links are used to streamline information privately within an organization, and you need to be logged into the organization’s private systems to use them. They usually have names that people will easily remember such as:

• go/handbook to quickly find the employee onboarding handbook within a company
 
• go/lunch to quickly access that day’s lunch menu on a University network

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In order to use go links, a go links system must be set up for your organization. There are a number of different methods to accomplish this but using Trotto is the easiest. Simply download the browser extension and get started immediately with no restrictions. Other implementations include setting up an internal DNS, setting up a server for an open source solution, or trialing with an expensive competitor.

Once you have go links set up within your organization, using them is just a matter of typing the link into your Internet browser’s address bar! You may be prompted to sign into your organization and you may need a browser extension, all depending your setup.

Typically, anyone in an organization can create a go link for any URL they want, and any go link they create can instantly be used by their entire team. So, you could simplify your organization’s links to the point where:

• go/eng-meeting → links to the Engineering team’s meeting agenda in Google Drive
• go/board → links to your project management board in Jira
• go/calendar → links to the school’s year calendar on the University website
• go/english-105 → links to the course syllabus for English 105 at the University
• go/healthcare → links to the employee healthcare benefits portal on an HR website

This is a key element of the benefit of go links; it increases your productivity but also makes links shareable with others. Instead of remembering which email / Slack / other message that someone told you about a few months ago, simply try using a go link. For example, if you a new employee, you should be able to find all your onboarding materials at go/onboarding. Or use go/IT to find your IT resources.

Go links work through a simple redirect engine that stores two pieces of information: a short keyword and a destination URL. When you type a go link into your browser, here's what happens:

1. You type a go link - type something like go/okr into your browser's address bar, just like you'd type any URL
2. Trotto's browser extension recognizes the go link and redirects the request to your organization's Trotto instance
3. You land at the right place - Trotto looks up the keyword, finds the destination URL, and redirects you instantly. The whole process takes less than a second.

If you type a go link that doesn't work, Trotto will prompt you to create it - so the system grows organically as your team uses it.

Recommended reading: How do go links work?

Save time finding resources

Research shows employees spend an average of 3.6 hours per day searching for information they need to do their jobs. Go links eliminate the most common friction points — digging through bookmark folders, searching Slack history, or asking coworkers for a link. When everyone knows that go/crm leads to Salesforce and go/wiki leads to Confluence, the question "where's the link for...?" disappears.

Keep links alive when tools change

Organizations switch tools constantly. When you migrate from one project management tool to another, every link in every document, wiki page, and Slack message becomes outdated. With go links, you update the destination URL for go/tasks once, and every reference across your organization stays current. No broken links, no confusion.

Simplify onboarding

New hires face a steep learning curve just figuring out where things live. With go links, you hand them a simple list: go/onboarding for the onboarding guide, go/benefits for benefits information, go/pto for time-off requests, go/handbook for the employee handbook. They're productive from day one instead of spending their first week asking "where do I find...?"

Standardize knowledge access

Go links create a shared vocabulary for navigating your organization's resources. When everyone uses the same short links, knowledge becomes democratized — the intern can access the same information as the VP, using the same memorable URLs.

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Recommended Reading: Benefits of go links

You can get your team using go links in under 5 minutes. No IT involvement required, no servers to configure, no credit card needed. To set up go links with Trotto at your organization, or even for your personal use, head over to https://www.trot.to/getting-started.

Once you or someone in your organization has signed up, you can go wild creating shortcuts to all of your frequently used links.

Other tips include:

• Use our browser extension to quickly create new go links
• Check out "go/" to see the homepage for all your go links
• Search the homepage for all the go links that your org has created
• Update go links with new URLs (if needed)

Paid plans include single sign on access as well as a Slack app and an admin portal with usage analytics.

Go Links Security & Privacy

Go links contain internal URLs — so security matters. With Trotto, your go links are private and scoped to your organization by default:

Organization-scoped access: Only team members signed in with your company's email domain can view or create go links. There's no public directory and no way for outsiders to see your links.

SSO integration: Trotto supports single sign-on through Google Workspace, so authentication is handled by your existing identity provider.

Audit logging: See who created each go link, when it was created, and how often it's used. Full visibility into your organization's link activity.

SOC 2 Type II certified: Trotto has completed SOC 2 Type II certification, demonstrating adherence to industry-standard security controls.

Read more about our SOC 2 certification.

Advanced Features

Go links from Trotto also offers additional advanced features including programmatic links and quick searches.

Programmatic go links contain placeholders that map onto the destination URL. Use "%s" as the placeholder when creating the go link.

For example, you can use a placeholder to create a go link for all your Github repos:

go/github/%s

Then when using your go link, type in go/github/[repo name]

You can also use multiple placeholders in your go links. For example, you may have multiple organizations in Github. You could create a multiple placeholder go link by using:

go/github/%s/%s

Programmatic go links take the productivity of go links to the next level.

Figma Case Study

Figma has been one of our longest tenured customers with thousands of daily users. If you want to learn how one of the most innovative companies in the world benefits from go links, read more here.

As far as we can tell, go links were first used at Google starting in 2006, and in 2008 Google provided its go links service as a tool available to the public, the Google Short Links app. While the Google Short Links app is no longer available, many ex-Googlers (also known as Xooglers) around the world have been implementing homegrown go links tools at their new companies because they are so useful!

In 2014, the founder of Trotto and former Googler, Jon Gaulding was working at Optimizely. Anticipating that the problem of finding and sharing the right docs and tools would only get worse—and with some prodding from other Xooglers—he decided to set up a go links app for the company. To the entire company’s delight, people no longer had to spin their wheels sifting through the myriad docs and apps to find information.

Realizing how helpful go links are and how much of a no brainer it is to have them at any growing company, Jon decided to build Trotto.

Check out this interview with the creators of go links at Google to learn more!