Google has been testing a new tracking URL format, google.com/goto, within its search results. This was first spotted by Brodie Clark on July 2, who shared it on X along with a screenshot.
Now, after roughly two months of testing, it appears Google is close to a full rollout.
Derek Perkins posted about this on X, wrote:
“Google has been testing anti-bot measures that eliminate all client-side links in favor of the google.com/goto… server-side redirects. It was widely reported the first week of August from the first major test, and as of this morning, we’re seeing near 100% rollout across several residential IP providers. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of goto-only SERPs we’ve fetched over the last ~4 months of the test.
At Nozzle we’ve been discarding those so that our customer data isn’t polluted with opaque links, and the percentages were low enough that it wasn’t an issue.
If this continues as is, we’re looking at something akin to the num=100 rollout from last fall. The goto links can’t be decoded, so providers will have to follow the redirect links. While that works in small-scale tests, Google seems likely to make that tough, since each SERP will have hundreds of links to decode.”
Here is the screenshot of the data shared by Derek Perkins.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this test, telling Barry Schwartz:
“We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.”
This change could have a meaningful impact on rank tracking tools and SEO platforms that rely on decoding search result links, since the goto redirect format can’t be decoded the way traditional links could. If this rolls out fully, tools may need to follow each redirect individually, which becomes far more resource-intensive at scale something Perkins compares to the impact of last fall’s num=100 rollout.
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