google.com/goto: Google’s anti-scraping update
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Google Search is rewriting organic result links to google.com/goto?url=… instead of exposing the destination URL directly in the HTML.
When you click a result, Google redirects you to the real page. The url parameter uses a custom, Google-specific encoding. It is not a plain base64 of the target URL. In practice, it looks like an opaque reference to Google’s index record for that page.
As of late August 2026, this is showing up consistently across searches when you are logged out or browsing in private mode. It may still be an experiment, but it is no longer limited to a small slice of SERPs.
Google has used redirect wrappers before. The older format is google.com/url?q=[URL-encoded destination], where the target link is readable in the query string.
The new goto format is different:
Google still needs the destination to draw the SERP (domain, favicon, attribution), so copies of the URL remain on the page. That is a separate story from reading Location. The walkthrough is here: google.com/goto: read Location with HEAD.
That shift matters for anyone building a search index from SERP data at scale.
This fits Google’s broader push against automated SERP harvesting, especially from AI crawlers and SEO scrapers that bulk-extract result URLs to build their own indexes.
With plaintext links, a scraper could parse thousands of URLs from HTML without touching Google again. With goto, each result needs a request back to Google just to learn the destination. You read Location; you do not follow through to the page. That is slower, noisier, and gives Google a clear signal when the same client resolves hundreds of links in sequence.
Combined with earlier moves like removing &num=100 and tightening BotGuard/SearchGuard, Google is steadily raising the cost of naive SERP scraping.
We first spotted goto links on a small percentage of SERPs. At that level, it was hard to ship a reliable fix without breaking responses for everyone else.
As of late August 2026, the pattern is much more consistent for logged-out and private sessions. Result URLs on Google Search are effectively all goto in those conditions.
We have been monitoring the rollout and testing against it.
We have updated our Google Search pipeline to resolve google.com/goto links (read Location, no follow) and return the final destination URL in API responses, in the same structured fields customers already use.
If you call Autom’s Google Search endpoints, you should keep getting usable destination URLs without changing your integration. We will keep watching Google’s rollout and adjust if the redirect format shifts again.
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