Google confirms why it hides real URLs in search results: what "goto" URLs are and how to protect your SEO data.

If you have checked Google search results in recent weeks and come across links starting with google.com/goto instead of the actual page address, it is not an error: it is a genuine change—officially confirmed by Google—in how web addresses are presented within its results.

En este artículo te explicamos qué está pasando, por qué lo hace Google, y -lo más importante- qué debes revisar en tus propias herramientas de análisis para no llevarte sorpresas.

What are Google's "goto" URLs?

Until now, when Google displayed a search result, the URL you saw was the actual address of the destination page. With the new system, Google inserts an intermediate URL in the format google.com/goto?url=… When the user clicks on it, Google redirects them almost instantly to the final page using a temporary redirect (technically, a 302 status code).

The result visible to the user is the same: they still reach your website without friction or perceptible delay. What changes is how that jump is recorded, and that does have consequences for those working with search data.

Why does Google do it? (It’s no longer a mystery)

Contrary to what was thought during the early days of the rollout, Google has now officially confirmed the reason. A spokesperson stated to industry publications such as Search Engine Land:

We have a long track record of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take action to protect our services and users.

In practical terms, the goal is to hinder the mass scraping of search results by third-party tools and AI engines that harvest data from SERPs without authorization. A telling technical detail: Google has blocked "lightweight" (HEAD) requests to these links, forcing a full download to resolve each URL—precisely the kind of friction that makes large-scale automated extraction difficult.

Moreover, this change does not come in isolation; it follows the elimination of the `num=100` parameter in September 2025, which had already forced crawling tools to make more requests to retrieve the same data. Together, these two changes are significantly driving up the cost of automated access to Google search results.

Which elements of the results does it affect the most?

According to SERP data providers that have analyzed the rollout, the impact is not uniform:

• Classic organic results: a virtually complete rollout, yet the sector's leading tools have already adapted their systems to automatically resolve these URLs in the vast majority of cases.
• Featured snippets and local pack: low or moderate impact.
• AI Overviews (AI-generated summaries) represent the area with the most uncertainty. Data providers are still fine-tuning their systems, so if your content strategy aims to get cited in these summaries, it is best to treat that data with a bit more caution for now.

The least discussed risk: attribution in Google Analytics 4

This is probably the point with the greatest practical impact for any marketing manager, and it deserves a somewhat more detailed explanation.

GA4 determines whether a session counts as "Google organic traffic" by looking at the referrer (the technical source of the click) and parameters such as UTMs or click IDs. If the redirect via google.com/goto does not cleanly preserve these signals by the time the user reaches your page, the session might no longer be counted as organic and could instead fall into the "(direct) / (none)" category—meaning traffic with no identified source.

The most important aspect of this risk is that it would be a silent failure: you won't see any error or warning. The way to detect it is by comparing two sources that normally move in tandem:

• Google Search Console: clicks shouldn't be affected, because Google records them in its own system, not on your website.
• Google Analytics 4: organic sessions could indeed drop, accompanied by a rise in "direct" traffic that cannot be explained by campaigns, apps, or other known sources.

It is worth clarifying that, to date, this is an identified and technically well-founded risk, not a confirmed large-scale problem. The recommendation from various industry analysts is to monitor the situation rather than react precipitously:

1. Save the organic-to-direct ratio from the last 90 days now as a reference.
2. Review Search Console clicks against GA4 organic sessions on a weekly basis.
3. If you notice that Search Console remains stable while GA4 shows an unexplained drop in organic traffic and a rise in direct traffic, then it would make sense to investigate further.

What about the SEO tools I already use? The case of Ahrefs.

It is worth being transparent here, because not all providers are handling the change equally well. Ahrefs published a statement on August 31, 2026, openly acknowledging the issue:

"Google has started routing an increasing portion of search results through /goto redirects instead of direct URLs. This has caused a temporary inconsistency in our data […] Our team is already working to restore the affected results."

In other words: if you use Ahrefs for rank tracking or competitor analysis, it is reasonable to expect some temporal inconsistencies in the data from late August and early September 2026 until they confirm the issue has been fully resolved. There is no cause for panic, but it is wise to exercise caution when interpreting sudden fluctuations during that specific period.

What does NOT change

It is worth clarifying this, as such changes can easily generate more noise than necessary: ​​your content continues to rank based on the exact same criteria as always. Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking processes operate completely independently of this change, which affects only the presentation layer of the results. Your users' experience remains unaffected, too: clicking still leads to your page, with an imperceptible delay.

What to check this week if you manage SEO or analytics

• Confirm with your rank tracking tool provider that it now correctly resolves google.com/goto URLs.
• If you use Ahrefs, keep in mind that data for this period may vary, and do not compare it blindly with previous periods.
• Save a baseline for your organic-to-direct traffic ratio in GA4 and review it weekly against Search Console over the coming weeks.
• If your strategy relies heavily on appearing in AI Overviews, treat that tracking data with a bit more margin of error for now.

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