Google has confirmed that clicking a search result no longer takes users straight to the destination URL. Instead, links now route through a google.com/goto?url=[hashURL] redirect before landing on the page. The company describes it as a security measure, but the practical effect lands squarely on anyone who depends on parsing Google’s link structure.
A Google spokesperson framed the change as routine: “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 statement does not mention scraping specifically, though the timing lines up with Google’s ongoing legal fight against SerpAPI, a rank-tracking data provider Google sued over scraping and where Google lost the most recent motion.
This is not a new experiment. In July, this publication reported Google was testing the goto wrapper on a subset of queries. What ran as a limited test in early July is now a broad rollout: Derek Perkins of rank-tracking vendor Nozzle told Search Engine Land on X that he is seeing “nearly a 100% rollout across several residential IP providers.” That is a meaningful jump from a controlled experiment to something closer to default behavior.
The mechanism itself is straightforward. Where a result link once exposed its plain destination URL in the page source and the browser address bar, it now resolves through a hashed Google-owned redirect first. Scrapers, third-party SERP-tracking tools, and any AI engine that crawls Google results to build its own index all have to parse an extra hop that did not previously exist, and the hashed parameter gives Google a lever to throttle or block that traffic at will.
Search Engine Land, citing Google, said the change should not affect Search Console reporting, since that data comes from Google’s own indexing pipeline rather than from the public-facing link structure. Ordinary searchers should notice almost nothing: Google still displays the visible URL beneath each snippet’s title, even though the clickable link itself now redirects. The one edge case worth watching is compromised or phishing pages, where a redirect layer could briefly delay how fast a malicious result is pulled from the index.
The real exposure sits with the tool layer between Google and the SEO team, not with the searcher. Any agency or in-house team running third-party rank trackers, click-through-rate dashboards, or automated SERP monitoring should confirm with those vendors, in the next few days, whether their scraping methods still function against the redirect and whether reported click or ranking data has shifted since the rollout. Teams relying on AI-driven competitive research tools that ingest Google results directly face the same exposure, since those tools scrape the same link structure Google just made harder to read.
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reported the confirmed goto redirect rollout on August 27, 2026, following the publication’s earlier report on Google’s July test of the same wrapper.
