Google has confirmed it is rolling out a change that adds a redirect hop to nearly every organic link in its search results. Clicking a result no longer takes you straight to the page. It first passes through a google.com/goto URL, then redirects you to the actual destination.
What Changed
Until now, a link in Google’s search results pointed directly at the page’s real URL. You could hover over a result and see exactly where it would take you before clicking.
Under the new setup, that same link points to something like google.com/goto?url=[hashed URL] instead. The browser briefly passes through that Google-owned URL before landing on the real page. Search Engine Roundtable first spotted this being tested in July 2026, and Google confirmed in late August 2026 that it was rolling the change out at nearly full scale across residential IP addresses.
Why Google Is Doing This
Google told Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable that this is a technical measure against evolving forms of abuse, aimed at protecting its services and users.
In plain terms, it makes it harder for third-party tools to scrape search results at scale. That includes rank-tracking software, SEO platforms, and AI companies that pull data from Google’s results pages. Google is currently in an ongoing lawsuit against SerpApi, a company it accuses of scraping its search results, and this change lands in the middle of that dispute.
What It Means If You Use SEO or Rank-Tracking Tools
If your team relies on third-party tools to track rankings, monitor SERPs, or pull competitor data, this is worth watching closely.
DataForSEO, one of the larger SERP data providers, said it had already built a fix before the wider rollout and now resolves the real destination URL for 99.99% of the organic search results it returns. The company reported that unresolved goto links are still showing up more often in specific SERP features: around 52% of AI Overview results, 25% of local pack results, and under 1% of featured snippets, as of late August 2026.
The practical takeaway: check with whichever rank-tracking or SERP tool your team uses. Most major providers appear to be adapting quickly, but it’s worth confirming your reports are still showing real URLs and not raw goto links, especially for AI Overview and local pack tracking.
Google Search Console data is not expected to be affected by this change, since it reports on your own site’s performance rather than scraping the public results page.
Impact on Regular Searchers
For most people searching on Google, this change is barely noticeable. You’ll still see the page’s real URL displayed under the result title. The only difference is you can no longer preview the exact destination URL by hovering over the link before clicking, since it now shows the intermediary goto link instead.
