Unable To Change Some Links To Inline in Confluence Editor

[Joe Bridgeman]

I've been having this sporadic issue in the Editor ("edit-v2" in the URL) where some links/URLs will show me the pop-up upon click to allow me to change their display style (URL, Inline, or Card) while others only display as URL and offer no ability to switch to Inline or Card. I have a confluence page where I actually list three links separated by a carriage return and the middle one, for whatever reason, does not show an option to change the display type, as shown in the screenshot below

Deleting the link and re-pasting it does not work. Typing the link manually does not work. Making sure there isn't a trailing '/' character on the URL has no effect. Disabling my browser's ad-blocker extension has no effect. I am not talking about a SmartLink.

Another user had this same issue in 2021, fixed it by manually typing, but then a new user commented in 2023 with this same issue unresolved by manually typing. (

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Display-Inline-Drop-Down-does-not-appear/qaq-p/1890970)

Has anybody dealt with this? Any tips? I'm not sure if this is being caused by an Editor bug locally, or if the link display feature depends on the linked website being configured in a certain way, etc...

[Mercy]

That behavior comes from how the new Confluence editor classifies links. The “Display as Inline/Card/URL” options only appear when Confluence recognizes the destination as a supported Smart Link target. If the URL doesn’t resolve through Atlassian’s Smart Link service—because the domain blocks link previews, requires authentication, or returns invalid metadata—Confluence falls back to a plain hyperlink with no style options. This can happen inconsistently even within the same page if one URL resolves and another doesn’t.
There’s no page‑level configuration to override that.