Google expands opaque goto redirects in search results, raising scraping costs

Google is increasingly rewriting organic search-result links as google.com/goto redirects instead of exposing destination URLs directly in search-result HTML, according to Autom, the search API provider that reported the change.

The pattern was reportedly visible consistently by late August 2026 in logged-out and private browsing sessions. The redirect’s URL parameter uses a Google-specific encoding and appears as an opaque reference to an index record, rather than a plainly readable destination address.

The change could make large-scale search-result scraping more difficult. Systems extracting result URLs may need to send an additional request to Google for each result and read the redirect’s Location response, increasing the cost and detectability of bulk harvesting.

Google has used redirect wrappers before, including google.com/url?q= followed by an encoded destination. Autom said destination information can still appear elsewhere on the results page, because Google needs it to display details such as the domain, favicon and attribution.

Autom said it has updated its Google Search pipeline to resolve goto links by reading Location without following the request through to the destination page. The company said its API will continue returning destination URLs in the structured fields used by customers.

The reported rollout may still be an experiment, and Google has not provided a stated rationale in the source material. Autom linked the change to broader measures affecting automated search harvesting, including the removal of &num=100 and tighter BotGuard and SearchGuard controls.