Broken Links: External Links in descriptions are being automatically updated to include the wordpress sites URL

Wordpress is automatically forcing links to include its own URL. How do we allow for an external site link to be used in a description?

Update:
It seems you can fix this by NOT including the “” around the site’s link in the HTML.

I’m unable to replicate that on my test site. The theme or another plugin could be filtering the content.

I recommend running a complete conflict test using the steps outlined on this documentation page: Testing for a Theme/Plugin Conflict

Here is where I found help on this issue - Custom URL is automatically adding site domain in front of it | WordPress.org