Google confirmed on August 26, 2026 that it is rewriting the links inside its search results, replacing each destination URL with an encoded redirect through google.com/goto. The same day, Derek Perkins of Nozzle reported the rollout as near-total across several residential IP providers. The behaviour was first spotted on June 23, 2026, more than two months before Google addressed it.
What Does the google.com/goto Redirect Do?
Links in Google’s search results are rewritten from the destination URL to google.com/goto?url=[hashURL], a server-side redirect that then forwards the user to the destination page. The encoding is custom, base64-like, and not directly decodable, so there is no way to read a real URL out of the string; the only way to find out where a link points is to follow the redirect itself, once per link. Derek Perkins of Nozzle put the practical consequence plainly: providers “will have to follow the redirect links,” which is difficult at scale because “each SERP will have hundreds of links to decode.” The dated record: first spotted June 23, 2026, by Alex Greenland, with Brodie Clark posting about it early at SERPAlerts; covered July 8, 2026, by Search Engine Roundtable as a limited test its own reporter, Barry Schwartz, could not reproduce, with only three people reporting the behaviour at that point; confirmed by a Google spokesperson on August 26, 2026, the same day Perkins reported “nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.”
Nine Weeks Passed Between Sighting and Statement
Search Engine Land describes the change as tested “for several months”; Search Engine Roundtable’s August 26 report dates the start of testing to July, even though its own July 8 story had already logged sightings from June 23. Whichever start date is right, the nine weeks between the June 23 sighting and the August 26 confirmation are not in dispute. On July 8 the reporter covering it could not replicate what he was writing about, and only three people had reported seeing it. By August 26 Derek Perkins of Nozzle reported the rollout as near-total across several residential IP providers, and Google confirmed the deployment the same day.
The Redirect Changes the Cost of Reading a Result Page
An encoded string that is not directly decodable, and can only be followed, turns every link on a result page into its own round trip to Google’s servers before it resolves anywhere else. The reporting is consistent about who feels that cost: third-party Google Search tracking tools and rank trackers, which Search Engine Land describes only conditionally as tools that “may be impacted in some way,” alongside scrapers and AI engines harvesting result pages. The reporting also notes such tools typically adapt, and that Ahrefs tooling is able to detect the pattern.
What Google Said, and What It Didn’t
Google has not published a blog post, a Search Central announcement, or a help-page entry about the redirect. The entire record is one sentence from a spokesperson: “We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.” That sentence names abuse, technical measures, and protecting services and users. It does not name scraping, rank trackers, AI engines, SerpApi, referrers, analytics, Search Console, or a date. The question that statement does not answer is what referrer now arrives with each click. Coverage of the rollout has gone no further than laying out the possible outcomes for what arrives at the destination and noting that which one occurs is “exactly the unknown that nobody can test at scale yet.” Whether Search Console data is affected is listed as unknown. Both questions remain open.
Two Unrelated Matters, Not One
A separate legal track is running in parallel, not underneath this one. Google’s amended complaint against SerpApi, refiled August 10 after a court dismissed the original complaint in full, survives only on the one claim resting on material Google says belongs to Reddit and two unnamed partners, not on anything Google assembled itself. Nothing in the record ties the redirect to that case; the two are parallel facts, not one story. The kind of research this redirect adds a cost to is visible elsewhere, too: a Growth Memo study found that 62% of vendor-authored listicles gained estimated traffic, with a median gain of 38%, while listicle share at position one fell from 18.9–20.2% to 15.1–15.6%, two figures that measure different units in a study that calls itself observational and identifies associations, not causal effects. Research of that kind runs by checking result pages at scale, the same operation the redirect now taxes one link at a time.
What changed on August 26 was not the redirect, first spotted on June 23. It was that Google confirmed it.
Source: Search Engine Land, “Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links”; Search Engine Roundtable, “Google Search Rolling Out google.com/goto Tracking Parameters”; Search Engine Roundtable, “Google Testing google.com/goto As Tracking URLs In Search Results”.