Google routes search clicks through internal goto redirects

By Zara Kincaid · 2026-08-28

What changed and what users now see

Google has confirmed it is rolling out redirect URLs on search result links, routing every click through google.com/goto?url=[hashURL] before forwarding users to their destination.^[1] The visible URL displayed under each snippet title stays the same, so the results page looks identical to before. The change lands in the browser status bar: searchers can no longer preview the real destination URL before clicking, because the href now points to Google's own redirect endpoint rather than the external page.^[1]

Google search results have traditionally linked directly to destination pages, exposing target URLs in the page HTML and the status bar. That direct link structure let crawlers, rank trackers and ordinary users inspect exactly where a click would go before committing to it. That behaviour has now been removed.

Industry impact: rank trackers and SERP scrapers

Derek Perkins, founder and CEO of rank tracking firm Nozzle, said the rollout was visible well before Google's official confirmation. As of 3 July 2026, Perkins recorded a nearly 100 per cent rollout of the goto redirects across several residential IP providers after months of intermittent testing.^[2] "We've been seeing that for months," Perkins said. "It's similar to before when you had JS disabled, they would wrap all the links in server-side redirects to get analytics. This is just a new form of that. We just throw away those SERPs and fetch new ones."^[2]

Rank tracking and SERP scraping tools have historically relied on direct link extraction from Google's results page HTML to collect ranking data at scale. Server-side redirects add an extra network hop that automated clients must follow, pushing up request volume and raising the likelihood of triggering Google's bot-detection systems. Larger tracking operations can adapt; smaller ones face a harder path.

Google Search Console reporting is unaffected.^[1] Publishers relying on first-party click data from Search Console will see no gap in their figures. The disruption falls entirely on third-party tooling that reads click destinations from the HTML of results pages rather than from Google's own reporting endpoints.

Google's rationale and the SerpApi lawsuit backdrop

Google offered a measured explanation for the change. "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," a Google spokesperson said.^[1] Google did not specify which forms of abuse the goto redirect targets.

The timing sits against a specific legal backdrop. In December 2025, Google sued search-data provider SerpApi under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, alleging that SerpApi bypassed its SearchGuard API to scrape search results. On 20 July 2026, the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss the key DMCA claims, ruling that blocking public search result scraping is not copyright circumvention when the underlying content is publicly accessible.^[3]

With the legal route to blocking scrapers now significantly narrowed, technical barriers have become Google's primary instrument. Google confirmed the goto redirect rollout on 26 August 2026.^[1]

Zara Kincaid

Zara Kincaid writes about artificial intelligence and search. Her focus is what happens to businesses when the front page of the internet stops being a list of links and starts being an answer.