Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at autom.dev. Read the original for the full text.
Autom's engineering team documents a significant change to Google Search result pages: organic result links now use a google.com/goto?url= redirect where the url parameter is a Google-specific opaque encoding, not a readable URL. As of late August 2026 this format is consistent for logged-out and private browsing sessions.
Key points
- Unlike the older google.com/url?q= format, the goto encoding cannot be decoded offline—the real destination URL is only revealed in the HTTP Location header when the /goto endpoint is requested.
- The change is designed to raise the cost of automated SERP scraping: each result now requires a separate network round-trip back to Google to resolve the destination.
- Google still displays the domain, favicon, and attribution on the SERP, so the page renders normally for human users.
- The pattern was first spotted on a small percentage of SERPs and has since become the default for logged-out sessions, consistent with a full rollout.
- Autom has updated their Google Search pipeline to resolve /goto links transparently, so customers receive final destination URLs in the same structured fields as before.
Why it matters
This is part of a broader series of Google moves—removing &num=100, tightening BotGuard—aimed at making bulk SERP harvesting economically unviable. Anyone building search tooling, SEO scrapers, or AI training pipelines from Google results needs to account for this new indirection layer.