Rank data bought from SERP API vendors may now contain Google redirect links where landing page URLs should be, because Google appears to be rate-limiting how quickly google.com/goto links can be followed. Search Engine Journal reported the problem Thursday, citing statements from DataForSEO and Serper, two companies that sell programmatic access to Google results. This is an update to our August 27 coverage of Google moving result links behind the goto wrapper.
Google has not announced the restriction. Neither vendor links to a Google statement, and everything below comes from their own websites and status pages. Treat the mechanism as the providers’ account of what they observe, not as confirmed Google policy.
DataForSEO’s November 2 article describes the limit this way. Opening several links from one results page in quick succession triggers throttling. Google then returns a page with a “Continue” button instead of passing the request to the destination, and the button stays disabled for a waiting period that lengthens the faster earlier links were resolved.
DataForSEO gave an example using a page with 18 goto links. Google may let the first five or six resolve immediately. The seventh could wait one second, the eighth three seconds, and by the fifteenth link the wait could reach 40 seconds. The company said it has seen waits of up to 120 seconds for a single URL.
The limit is tied to the results page, not to the IP address or the query. DataForSEO says rotating IP addresses or changing queries does not get around it. It also says that waiting an hour or more before resolving the remaining links does not reset the page’s allowance.
That design matters because it removes the usual scaling fix. Scrapers typically spread load across proxies. A cap keyed to the results page itself pushes the cost onto the one step every tool must perform, which is following each link to find the real destination. DataForSEO says the goto links cannot be decoded, so following them is the only route.
Vendors have responded differently, and the picture keeps moving:
- DataForSEO: Its slower Standard Priority tier now follows every goto URL, at the price of longer runs. The faster High Priority and Live tiers get through roughly half, per the company.
- Serper: The vendor’s status page logged the problem at 01 UTC on October 30. Its first workaround followed only the three highest organic listings and handed back the remaining seven as goto links, which become usable roughly half a minute after the query. A /resolve endpoint covers the rest. On October 31, Serper said it found another way to get real URLs for every result and called that approach “likely temporary.”
- SerpApi: Its status page logged goto links in organic results on October 30 and listed a fix by November 2. A second incident on November 3 reported the problem recurring on and off. Neither incident states a cause, and Search Engine Journal’s November 4 check found the second still marked Identified.
DataForSEO places the start of goto links in results in late August, which matches the rollout we covered then. The new element is the throttle, which the vendors place from about October 30 onward.
The practical risk sits in reporting. A URL that vanishes from a URL-level rank report may still hold its position, with the stored value being an unresolved redirect rather than the page address. Search Engine Journal advises checking, before reporting any URL-level loss, whether the stored value is a Google redirect. Ask the provider which collection method produced the data.
A misread here carries a cost beyond tidy dashboards. A client report that shows a landing page dropping out of the top 10 can trigger content rewrites, link-building spend, or a difficult stakeholder call, all prompted by a data artifact. The window that deserves suspicion runs from late October into early November, and Serper has said it would fall back to resolving only the top three results if Google caps its current method.
Search teams should audit rank exports for that date range now. Filter for google.com/goto strings in URL fields, flag any sudden clustering of missing landing pages, and hold URL-level loss narratives until each vendor confirms how it resolves links.
Search Engine Journal, Matt G. Southern, November 5, 2026, drawing on statements from DataForSEO, Serper, and SerpApi.
