For the past week or so, I have heard a few folks notice that Google is appending tracking URLs to the search results. So when you click on a search result, instead of the URL going directly to that site, Google is using a google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL that then passes through to the page URL listed in the search results.
These changes can have an impact on your tracking and of course, the third-party Google tracking tools that you might be using.
Brodie Clark at SERPAlerts spotted it early and posted about it on X but I received a couple other emails from readers (including Mark – thanks) that they started to notice this as well. I am still unable to replicate it.
Here is what it looks like when you check the URL Google is linking to (I cropped the image a bit):
Brodie also shared how Ahrefs is picking up on this URL pattern more:
I wonder if this is just a test or if Google is slowly rolling out this new click URL behavior for the search results? If so, this may affect your tracking and analytics.
This was first spotted here by Alex Greenland back on June 23rd:
New for Google Search: google•com/goto to fight AI and SEO scrapers
Result link URLs are now being rewritten to google•com/goto?url=[custom base64-like encoding of URL or Google ID]. Upon click, they redirect to their proper destination.
I’m seeing this consistently this… pic.twitter.com/BCCWc6WGKG
— Alex Greenland (@ajrgd) June 23, 2026
We’ve been seeing that for months. It’s similar to before when you had js disabled, they would wrap all the links in server side redirects to get analytics. This is just a new form of that. We just throw away those SERPs and fetch new ones
— Derek Perkins (@Derek_Perkins) July 3, 2026
The other issue with this change is that as a searcher, I often want to preview the URL I am going to, to make sure it is not a phishing or spam site.
To be clear, I only spotted three people so far who noticed this and I cannot see it myself – yet.
Forum discussion at X.
