Google has begun routing some organic search result clicks through a google.com/goto redirect before sending users to the destination page, rather than linking directly to the site. The wrapper interrupts the direct handoff between a search results page and a destination site, which can alter what referrer data third-party analytics tools receive on click. Search Engine Roundtable reported the test after readers flagged the new URL pattern showing up in results over the past several days.
Brodie Clark of SERPAlerts flagged the pattern on X. Barry Schwartz covered the test for Search Engine Roundtable on July 8, citing reader reports alongside Clark’s findings, though he said he could not reproduce the redirect in his own searches. Just three people have confirmed seeing it so far, according to Schwartz’s reporting.
The rewritten link carries an encoded destination inside a query parameter attached to google.com/goto, then forwards the browser to the original page on click. Alex Greenland first documented an early version of the redirect on June 23, and Ahrefs has since started registering the new URL pattern in its own crawl data. Derek Perkins, an SEO practitioner who replied to Greenland’s post, said the technique resembles a redirect Google has used for months whenever JavaScript was disabled, wrapping links server-side to preserve click analytics before a page could render. His team already discards search results pages captured by automated tools and re-fetches them, a workaround this redirect could reinforce rather than defeat.
The pattern is widely read as a countermeasure against AI crawlers and SEO scraping tools that pull ranked URLs directly from search result pages. Routing every click through a Google-owned domain gives Google a vantage point to observe, and potentially throttle, non-human traffic patterns before a scraper ever reaches the destination site. Google has not confirmed this rationale. The company has not said whether the redirect is a limited test or a broader rollout.
That silence matters for tracking. A visit that used to arrive at a site with a referrer of google.com/search now completes after an added hop through google.com/goto. Depending on how a browser or an ad blocker treats that hop, the referrer header can arrive blank or get dropped by scripts that only capture the first request. Third-party click trackers, rank-tracking tools, and any attribution stack that fires on the initial click, rather than on final page load, risk undercounting Google organic sessions until they account for the extra redirect.
Schwartz also flagged a cost for searchers. Hovering over a result to preview its destination, a habit built to spot phishing or spam sites before clicking, now shows a Google-owned redirect instead of the real domain.
Search teams should check Google Analytics and server-side logs for a dip in referrer-tagged organic sessions over the next few weeks. Then confirm whether Search Console click totals still reconcile with what rank-tracking tools report as the redirect reaches more queries.
Search Engine Roundtable, in a July 8, 2026 article by Barry Schwartz, first reported Google’s test of the google.com/goto redirect in search results.
