Short version - Apple has spent the last few years quietly stripping the tracking parameters that marketers rely on to know which ads work. It started with iOS 17 in 2023 and iOS 26 escalated it. If your tracking depends on click IDs, a growing share of your Safari and Apple traffic is now going dark but UTMs survive and there are concrete ways to keep your attribution accurate. Here's the real state of play and what to do about it.

Topics: Email Marketing Automatic Link Builder Facebook conversions UTM value UTM UTM values Attribution Health WBRAIDS GCLID

5 min read

GCLID vs GBRAID vs WBRAID: Google Ad Identifiers (2026)

By Scott Desgrosseilliers on May 4, 2021, 4:12:54 PM

GCLID vs GBRAID vs WBRAID: Decoding Google's Ad Identifiers in 2026

If you run Google Ads, you've probably noticed something odd in your landing-page URLs. Some clicks arrive with the familiar gclid parameter. Others show up with gbraid or wbraid instead. And if your tracking only captures gclid, you're silently losing attribution data on a growing share of your traffic because Google now uses three different click identifiers depending on the device, browser, and the user's privacy settings.

Here's what each one is, when Google sends it, and why capturing all three now matters more than ever.

THE SHORT VERSION
- GCLID is the original Google Click Identifier, used since 2005. It's the gold standard — a rich, deterministic identifier tied to a single click, carrying campaign, ad group, keyword, device, and more. But it only works where Apple allows it.
- GBRAID and WBRAID are the privacy-safe parameters Google introduced in 2021 for iOS traffic where gclid can no longer be used. They measure performance in aggregate, without identifying an individual user.

Topics: conversion tracking WBRAIDS GBRAIDS Google Ads GCLID Apple ATT

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