& in the URL of the GETs in the direct?

Question

contextual advertising

Good afternoon!
The directologist puzzled me here with his UTM marks.
The bottom line is that when you click on an advertisement in GETs of UTMs, the code amp is added to the ampersand separator (&); , i.e. the link looks like
/?utm_source=yandex&utm_medium=cpc&
Initially I thought it was a handler on the site side, I checked .htaccess - nothing, the php settings are also normal, in particular arg_separator.output is "&", and manually clicked on links with arbitrary parameters, everything is ok, nothing anywhere not appended on the server side.
We decided to check the tags directly in the direct, as they are written there, because. there were thoughts that the director thoughtlessly copied the URL from somewhere and did not look at what he was copying, but no, in the UTM direct, the links are also spelled out normally, without the prefix amp;
Does anyone have any idea what the hell this is?

Answer 1

In html form, the link should be with &. The browser, at the same time, sends it to the server with & ( &this is the symbol & in html, where & itself is a special character)
If for some reason your request gets a link with &, maybe it's some kind of irrational bot that sends it without interpreting and not the user through the browser?
Or is there a double conversion somewhere, and you get a link with &, which then turns back into &, and not &?