Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results
Google has begun rewriting organic search result links to use a new google.com/goto redirect format instead of exposing destination URLs directly in the HTML. This change, which is now consistent for logged-out and private browsing sessions, requires an additional request to resolve the actual URL via the Location header. The update is part of a broader strategy to increase the technical difficulty and cost of automated SERP scraping by AI crawlers and SEO tools.
- ▪Google Search now uses google.com/goto?url=... links that contain an opaque, custom-encoded reference rather than a readable destination URL.
- ▪The new format prevents offline decoding of target URLs, forcing scrapers to make individual requests to Google to read the Location header.
- ▪This rollout is consistent as of late August 2026 for users who are logged out or browsing in private mode.
- ▪The change is designed to counter automated SERP harvesting by making bulk extraction slower and more detectable.
- ▪Autom.dev has updated its pipeline to resolve these new links and return final destination URLs in its API responses.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Autom |
| Canonical URL | https://www.autom.dev/blog/google-search-goto-links |
| Publication time | Sat, 12 Sep 2026 03:14:20 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-12T03:42:51.109Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-12T03:42:51.109Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | giiOxXQ-llHW · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
GoogleAugust 27, 2026|by Autom Teamgoogle.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping updateWhat's happening 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. Not the same as google.com/url Google has used redirect wrappers before.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Autom.
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