Common anti-phishing advice tells users to mouse over links, look at the URL, and compare to the expected destination, implicitly assuming that they are able to read the URL. To test this assumption, we conducted a survey with 1929 participants recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic platforms. Participants were shown 23 URLs with various URL structures. We found that participants were strongly biased towards answering that the URL would lead to the website of the organization whose name appeared in the URL, regardless of its position in the URL structure. The group with the highest technology use was only minorly better at URL reading.
