Google hides direct URLs in search results with /goto redirects
Original: Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results
Why This Matters
Forces every SERP scraper and search data vendor to add per-link server round-trips, raising infrastructure costs and exposing automation patterns to Google.
As of late August 2026, Google Search is rewriting organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... instead of exposing destination URLs directly in HTML. The encoded url parameter cannot be decoded offline, forcing scrapers to make a separate HEAD request per result to retrieve the real destination from the Location header.
Google has begun consistently replacing plaintext href links in search results with opaque redirect URLs under the google.com/goto format. Unlike the older google.com/url?q= wrapper — where the target was readable directly in the query string — the new goto links use a proprietary encoding that only resolves server-side via an HTTP Location header. Scrapers can no longer parse destination URLs from raw HTML alone; each result now requires an additional round-trip to Google.
The shift was first spotted on a small fraction of SERPs, but by late August 2026 it had become the consistent behavior for logged-out and private browsing sessions. Google still exposes domain names, favicons, and attribution on the SERP itself — it needs that data to render results — but the clickable href is now the goto blob.
This move fits a broader Google anti-scraping push that includes removing the &num=100 parameter and tightening BotGuard/SearchGuard enforcement. Resolving hundreds of goto links in sequence produces a distinct traffic pattern, giving Google a clearer signal of automated bulk harvesting.
SERP data vendor Autom says it has updated its pipeline to handle the new format — issuing HEAD requests, reading Location without following the redirect — and claims customers can continue receiving destination URLs through its existing API fields without integration changes.