That’s what hyperlink auditing with the ping attribute is for:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-...

You put a `ping` attribute on a link, and when the user follows the link, the browser sends a request to the ping URL notifying it of the action.

Firefox disables it by default, which doesn’t seem like much of a privacy win considering JavaScript is enabled by default and can polyfill this functionality.

Giving Javascript the ability to make requests without asking the user via dialog for each one—if we must allow it at all—was a mistake.