What a share link is
Samsara calls it Live Sharing. Motive calls it a share link. Both do the same thing: a dispatcher at the carrier picks a truck, sets how long the share should last, and gets a URL. Anyone who opens the URL sees that one truck on a map, updating every few seconds, with no login. The carrier is not granting access to their account. They are handing you a window onto one vehicle for a set number of hours or days.
That is why carriers hand them out so readily. An API connection means an admin, permissions, and a broker inside their system. A share link means copying a URL into a text message, and it expires on its own. For a load booked off a load board with a carrier you will use once, it is the only tracking you are realistically going to get.
What it can and cannot tell you
The page shows more than the dot suggests. Behind it is a position with a timestamp, heading and speed, usually a reverse-geocoded address, and often whether the engine is on. Samsara's page carries the truck's unit number and, if the carrier chose to share it, the driver's name. Motive's shows the vehicle and a bearing. Read regularly, that is enough to draw the route the truck has taken, compute an ETA, and tell a parked truck from a moving one.
What it cannot tell you is anything about the load. The page does not know which of your loads the truck is on, whether the driver has picked up, or that the delivery window is 6 to 7 a.m. It also cannot tell you when it has stopped being true: an expired link shows a polite message, not an alarm. And it carries no hours-of-service data, so an ETA from it alone will not know the driver has two hours left on the clock.
The manual way, and what it costs
Most brokerages use the link the way it arrives: paste it into the load's notes, open it when the customer asks, close it. That turns a live feed into a check call with a better interface. The position is only looked at when someone is worried, which means the loads nobody is worried about are the ones that go wrong unseen.
The other cost is the tab. A track and trace operator working thirty share links has thirty browser tabs, each one a map that only means something if they remember which load it belongs to. That is a workload that scales with the board, and it is the reason the links get opened once at booking and never again.
Reading it automatically
The page is built from the same data the carrier's own app uses, and it fetches that data with the token in the URL as its only credential. Software can read it the same way a browser does: open the link, take the position, write it to the load, do it again in a minute. From then on the link behaves like any other tracking source. The truck shows on the map beside the loads tracked by app or ELD, the ETA updates as it moves, the geofence at the receiver records the arrival, and the same alerts fire if it goes quiet.
LoadSignal does this for Samsara and Motive links. Paste the link on the load, or put it in the tracking-link column of a spreadsheet import, or send it in the API call that creates the load. The link is read every minute, thinned to one position a minute so the trail draws cleanly, and shown on the load with the truck number and the time of the last fix. A link the vendor cannot read is kept and opened in a new tab, which is what the notes field was doing anyway.
One thing to be honest about: reading the page this way is best effort, because the carrier controls the link and the vendor controls the page. If the vendor changes what the page does, the reading stops until it is fixed, and the load says so rather than showing a dot that stopped moving.
What to ask the carrier for
Three things, and all of them belong on the rate confirmation rather than in a phone call after pickup.
Ask for the link itself before pickup, as a condition of the tender next to the tracking clause. A carrier that sends it at booking has agreed to be watched. One that promises to send it later usually does not.
Ask for an expiry after the delivery window rather than at it. Carriers default to 24 hours because that is what the button offers, and a late truck then goes dark at the moment you most need to see it. The share should run until the day after delivery.
Ask for the unit number. A share link shows one truck, so if the carrier swaps tractors mid-trip the link keeps showing the old one, parked. With the unit number you can tell a swap from a breakdown.
The tracking clause guide has language you can copy for this.
When the link stops working
A share link ends three ways. It expires on the schedule the carrier set. The carrier stops it early, usually because the load delivered and they tidied up, occasionally because they would rather you did not watch. Or the truck goes dark: engine off overnight, a dead zone, a swapped tractor. In the last case the page looks exactly as it does when everything is fine, and that is how a dark truck goes unnoticed for an afternoon.
Handled by software, the three cases are told apart. An expired link is an exception the moment the page says so. A link that answers but reports nothing new for ten minutes is stale tracking, the same alert a quiet driver app raises, and it goes to whoever is watching the load. A truck that is stopped but still reporting is a stop, not a loss, and the question becomes how long it has been there. What to do in each case is its own guide: when a carrier stops tracking mid-load.