Custom domains

A link on your own domain reads as yours. It carries your brand instead of a shortener’s, it’s more likely to be trusted by the person about to click, and it keeps your campaigns visibly under one name. The routing, analytics, click-quality classification, and never-404 behavior are all identical to a link on a Kilo hostname - the only thing that changes is the name in front of the slug.

To use a domain you already own, you add it in the dashboard and prove you control it. Kilo gives you a DNS TXT record to add at your domain’s DNS provider; once it’s visible, Kilo confirms ownership and provisions the secure certificate for you. A TXT record is just a small text entry in your DNS settings - it doesn’t affect your website, email, or anything else the domain does.

After verification, links you mint on that host look like go.yourbrand.com/aA3k9. They behave exactly like any other Kilo link; they’re simply hosted under your name.

If you don’t want to bring a whole domain, you can claim a branded subdomain within Kilo’s own space instead - a short, memorable label that’s yours. It’s the lighter-weight way to get your name onto your links without touching DNS at all: no record to add, no certificate to wait on. You still get the same routing and analytics behind it.

A custom domain changes the name on your links, not how they work. Every link you mint on your own host behaves exactly like one on a Kilo hostname: the same edge routing rules, the same click-quality classification, the same never-404 behavior when a link is paused or archived, and the same aggregate analytics with no raw IP address stored. Your analytics simply record which host each click came in on, so a link on your domain and a link on a Kilo hostname stay cleanly separated in the numbers.

The public trust surface follows your name too. When someone appends a + to one of your links or checks it on the verify page, they see it resolving under your domain - the brand doing the redirect is yours, end to end. Nothing about the custom domain opts you out of the platform’s guarantees; it opts your name into them.

Here’s the part to decide up front. In Kilo, an account isn’t tied to a domain - but each individual link is bound to the host it was minted on, permanently. The slug aA3k9 on go.yourbrand.com and the same slug on a Kilo hostname are two different links, and a link doesn’t move house.

That’s a deliberate consequence of the permanence promise. A printed QR code encodes a specific host and slug; if links could be reassigned to other domains, a code on a delivered box could silently start pointing somewhere else. Binding each link to its mint host forever is what makes a printed code trustworthy years later.

That closes the loop from a first account to a fully branded, self-hosted set of links. If you’re mapping out how the pieces fit, the link lifecycle guide is a good place to revisit next.