Google confirms deploying goto URL redirects to search results links

Google has confirmed it is rolling out new “technical measures” to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services. Google is rolling out the addition of goto URL parameter redirects to the links in its search results.

What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:

• “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.”

What changed. Previously, when you clicked on a search result, it would show the page’s full URL and take you to that URL. It looked like this:

The new technical measure to protect against abuse, adds a redirect hope to google.com/goto?url=[hashURL] and then takes you to the page.

Why is Google doing this. Google said it is doing this as a technical measure to protect against abuse of its search results and protect its services. Technically, this should make it harder for third-party tools, services, scrapers, and AI engines to scrape the Google search results. Such as companies like SerpAPI, which Google sued over scraping and lost the latest motion.

More details. Derek Perkins from Nozzle told me on X that Google has been pushing this change live and he sees it at “nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.”

Why we care. If you are using third-party Google Search tracking tools, those tools may be impacted in some way. Keep an eye on your data and what your tools are reporting. If something seems off in the coming days, maybe reach out to those tool providers to see if they have a plan.

Google has been testing this for a couple of months now, and you have to assume that Google Search Console data is not impacted by this change.

From a searcher’s perspective, this probably has almost no impact, outside of them not being able to preview the full URL in the browser bar before clicking. But Google does show the URL under the title of the snippet. But if there is some sort of hack or phishing exploit on the site, then it might cause some issues, although Google is generally pretty good at removing those pages from its search results pretty quickly.