One QR code with multiple links: how it works

The code encodes a short link. When it is scanned, a server evaluates your rules and forwards the visitor to the matching URL. Change the rules and you change the behavior without touching the printed code.

This is the same mechanism as any conditional redirect. The code itself is fixed; everything that decides where a scan lands lives on the server, which is why the printed pattern does not care how many destinations sit behind it.

A QR code can only open one thing at scan time — you cannot show a menu of links on the scanner's phone before they choose. 'Multiple links' means conditional routing, not a chooser. (A landing page can offer a chooser, but that is a page, not the code.)

The distinction matters when someone asks for a code that 'gives you a choice'. The honest answer is that the code decides, not the reader — and a page with buttons behind the code is the only way to hand the decision over.

Rules are evaluated from the highest priority down and the first match wins, so the list is a decision order rather than a set of independent filters.

Four conditions cover almost every real case, and they come from what the phone already reports: country from IP geolocation, device and operating system from the user agent, language from the browser's header. A good default catches anything that matches nothing.

One code with rules is cheaper to print and cheaper to manage: one artwork, one placement, one thing to edit. It is the right answer when the variations are about who the reader is — their country, their platform, their language.

Several codes are better when the variation is about where the scan happened. If you want to know which poster, which table tent or which store performed, each placement needs its own code, because a rule cannot tell a poster from a bus stop.

Rules fail quietly. A wrong order or a typo in a country code still sends the visitor somewhere, just not where you meant, and nothing in the dashboard will tell you.