Google has put a hop in front of every link in its results. The stated point is to make its results unreadable to machines.
Google confirmed on 26 August that it is rolling out google.com/goto redirect links in place of direct URLs on its search results pages. Instead of pointing at the destination, each result now routes through google.com/goto?url=[hashed value], and the hash cannot be decoded without actually following the redirect. Testing started in July 2026; the change is now near full rollout across residential IP ranges. Google describes it as a technical measure to protect against abuse of its search results and to protect its services. In practice the arithmetic is the point: a results page carries hundreds of links, so anything that wants the real URLs must now make a separate request for each one, which turns a single cheap page fetch into hundreds of expensive ones. The obvious targets are the scraping services that resell Google results — SerpAPI and its competitors, rank trackers, and the AI systems that read search pages in order to answer questions. Ordinary searchers see very little: the destination still appears under the snippet, it just no longer sits in the address bar before you click. Third-party SEO and analytics tools are already reporting changed or missing referrer data.
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