Google rewrites SERP links to opaque google.com/goto redirects, raising the cost of scraping results at scale

jedisct1 · x · 2026-09-13

• Since late August 2026, Google Search consistently rewrites organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... when logged out or in private mode, hiding destination URLs from the HTML.
• Unlike the old google.com/url?q= wrapper, the new url parameter is an opaque reference to Google's index record that cannot be decoded offline; the real URL must be read from the Location header of a request to /goto (without following the redirect).
• The change targets automated SERP harvesting, especially AI crawlers and SEO scrapers: each result now requires a round trip back to Google, making bulk index-building slower, noisier, and easier to detect.

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