If you’ve hovered over a Google search result recently and noticed the link starts with google.com/goto rather than the website’s own address, you’re not imagining it.
Google has started routing clicks from its results through its own redirect before sending people on to the page they chose. It’s a small change on the surface, and it’s already causing a fair bit of worry about rankings, analytics and the SEO tools agencies rely on.
Here’s what has actually changed, what Google has said about it, and what it does and doesn’t mean for your search performance.
Big Fat Digital | Knowledge Hub
Normally, a link in Google’s search results points straight to the destination page. With the new setup, the link points to a Google address first, something like google.com/goto?url= followed by an encoded string. When you click, Google redirects you to the page you picked.
From the searcher’s point of view, very little changes. The site name and address still show above each result, and clicking still lands on the right page. The difference is what happens in between, and what you see if you hover over the link before clicking.
The destination in the goto link isn’t written as a normal web address. It’s encoded, so you can’t read where the link goes just by looking at it.
The change was spotted in testing during July 2026 and reported as rolling out widely on 26 August 2026, according to Search Engine Roundtable. It isn’t showing for every search or every user yet, and some people still see direct links depending on where and how they search.
Google confirmed the rollout but hasn’t published detailed documentation. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Roundtable:
“We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse.”
The spokesperson added that Google regularly takes steps to protect its services and users.
Google hasn’t said exactly which abuse it’s targeting. The general reading across the industry is that it’s aimed at automated scraping of search results. Because the destinations are encoded, anything collecting results in bulk now has to follow each redirect to find out where a link goes, which makes large-scale scraping slower and more expensive.
No. This is a change to how links in the results are delivered, not a change to how pages are ranked. Google hasn’t announced any change to ranking signals alongside it, and there’s no evidence of sites gaining or losing positions because of it.
If your rankings have moved recently, it’s worth looking elsewhere for the cause, such as content changes, competitors, links, technical issues or a separate Google update, rather than putting it down to the goto links.
This is where the change matters most for agencies.
Rank trackers work by checking search results and recording where each site appears. If the links in those results are encoded redirects, a tool can’t simply read the destination. It has to follow each redirect to work out which page is ranking.
So far, the big providers seem to be handling it. Semrush has said there is no impact on its rank tracking or data accuracy. Derek Perkins of the rank tracking platform Nozzle said Google’s rollout was close to 100% across several residential IP providers it tests through, and that the links can’t be decoded, only followed.
The practical risk is smaller tools, or tools under pressure from the extra work, showing gaps or odd results for a while. If your tracking suddenly shows missing URLs, the wrong landing page or positions that don’t match what you see yourself, the redirects are one possible explanation worth ruling out.
There’s no evidence so far that it does. Visitors still arrive from Google, and there have been no widely reported changes to how Google organic traffic appears in GA4.
Search Console is unaffected in principle, because it’s Google’s own data about impressions and clicks rather than something gathered by scraping results. Google hasn’t announced any reporting changes linked to the redirects.
That said, it’s sensible to keep an eye on things. If organic traffic in your analytics suddenly drops while Search Console clicks hold steady, that gap is worth investigating.
One knock-on effect has nothing to do with SEO. For years, a common bit of online safety advice has been to hover over a link and check where it goes before clicking. With goto links, hovering only shows a Google address, so that check no longer works on Google results.
Security company Malwarebytes has raised this, pointing out that the destination shown above a result is Google’s own display rather than an independent check. It doesn’t make search results less safe in itself, but it removes one way people used to sense-check links.
For most businesses, the right response is calm housekeeping rather than any change in strategy.
The goto redirects are another sign that Google is tightening control over its results. Between AI Overviews, AI Mode and now encoded links, the search results page is becoming more of a Google-controlled environment and less of an open list of links that anyone can collect.
For businesses, the fundamentals haven’t changed. Sites that are technically sound, genuinely useful and backed by real authority still win. What’s changing is how visibility is measured, which makes it more important to use first-party data, read tool data critically and look at search performance across both traditional and AI-powered search.
It’s a redirect Google now uses in some search results. Instead of linking straight to a website, the result links to a Google address with an encoded destination, and Google then redirects the visitor to the page they clicked.
No. Google hasn’t announced any change to ranking signals alongside the redirects, and there’s no evidence of sites gaining or losing rankings because of them. It’s a change to how links are delivered, not to how pages are ranked.
It can. Rank trackers now have to follow each redirect to find the destination page. Major providers such as Semrush have reported no impact, but if your data shows missing or mismatched URLs, the redirects are worth ruling out.
There’s no evidence so far that it does. Visitors still arrive from Google, and Search Console uses Google’s own click and impression data. It’s still worth watching for any sudden gap between the two.
Changes like this are a good reminder that SEO reporting needs a sensible eye, not just a dashboard. If your rankings, analytics and Search Console are telling you different stories, it’s worth getting someone to look at them together.
At Big Fat Digital, our SEO services include clear, honest reporting built on first-party data, so you know what’s really happening with your visibility.
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