Building Guides

URL Matching

GuideSail uses URL matching to decide which guide to display when a user visits a page. Understanding how this works helps you target the right pages, especially for dynamic routes.

How it works

When a user's browser loads a page with GuideSail installed, the runtime checks the current URL against the URL Match value stored on each of your guides. If a guide's pattern matches the current URL, that guide is eligible to run (subject to its launch settings).

Default behavior

When you create a guide, the URL Match is automatically set to the exact URL of the page you had open in the Builder — query parameters and trailing slashes stripped.

Example: If you were on https://app.example.com/dashboard/?sh=1234, the URL Match is saved as https://app.example.com/dashboard.

For most cases, this is exactly what you want.

Wildcard matching with *

Use * as a wildcard to match any characters in a URL segment. This is useful for dynamic routes.

Pattern	Matches	Does not match
https://app.example.com/dashboard	/dashboard exactly	/dashboard/settings
https://app.example.com/dashboard*	/dashboard, /dashboard/settings, /dashboard/anything	/other
https://app.example.com/users/*/profile	/users/123/profile, /users/abc/profile	/users/123/settings

Editing the URL Match

1. Open the guide in the Builder.
2. Edit the URL Match field under the Guide title and ID.
3. Save the guide.

Notes

• URL matching ignores query parameters (e.g. ?ref=email).
• Trailing slashes are normalized — example.com/page and example.com/page/ are treated the same.
• Each guide matches on its first hrefMatches entry. Multiple patterns per guide are not currently supported in the Builder UI.