Google removes direct URLs from search results
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
Google Search now rewrites organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... for logged-out users.
The change hides destination URLs, raising scraping costs and breaking hover-to-check habits.
Background
Google has used redirect wrappers before, but the older format google.com/url?q=[URL-encoded destination] exposed the target link in the query string. The new goto format uses a custom, Google-specific encoding that cannot be decoded offline, with the real URL only in the Location header after a request back to Google. Autom, which documented the shift, says it fits Google's broader push against automated SERP harvesting by AI crawlers and SEO scrapers, alongside earlier moves like removing &num=100 and tightening BotGuard/SearchGuard.
How it unfolded
- Aug 27, 2026Autom published a blog post describing Google Search rewriting organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... instead of exposing destination URLs in the HTML.
- Aug 27, 2026Autom reported the goto pattern was showing up consistently across searches when logged out or in private mode, no longer limited to a small slice of SERPs.
- Aug 27, 2026Autom said it updated its Google Search pipeline to resolve google.com/goto links and return the final destination URL in API responses.
- Sep 12, 2026A Hacker News item titled 'Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results' appeared, with a commenter describing redirect URLs in the form www.google.com/goto?url=<opaque base64 string>.
- Sep 12, 2026Tim Clements posted on LinkedIn about the change, and a Hacker News comment referenced the Autom blog post.
Who’s saying what
- Analysts
- Autom says the shift fits Google's broader push against automated SERP harvesting, especially from AI crawlers and SEO scrapers that bulk-extract result URLs to build their own indexes.
- Caution
- Tim Clements says the change erodes habits security awareness training relies on, such as hover-to-check, because search result links now hide the destination URL.
- Public
- A Hacker News commenter said the redirect URLs sometimes take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
Still unverified
Autom says it may still be an experiment, though it is no longer limited to a small slice of SERPs. A Hacker News commenter said the base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure containing a long string of bytes in field 2 that presumably identify the URL.