Billions of Google redirects to stop working next year
Google’s URL shortener service will stop serving completely on August 25, 2025, which will result in billions of redirected URLs to stop working after that date.
Google stopped allowing us to make new redirects with this service back in March 2019, the service initially launched in 2009.
“Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying your users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page,” Google wrote.
What it will look like. Starting August 23, 2024 those clicking on those redirected URLs will get this notice, this interstitial:
Then August 25, 2025, that notice will go away and the URLs will stop working completely and just serve a 404 not found error.
More details. Google wrote the following details around this service shutting down.
“Over time the percentage of links that will show the interstitial page will increase until the shutdown date. This interstitial page should help you track and adjust any affected links that you will need to transition as part of this change. We will continue to display this interstitial page until the shutdown date after which all links served will return a 404 response.
Note that the interstitial page may cause disruptions in the current flow of your goo.gl links. For example, if you are using other 302 redirects, the interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you’ve embedded social metadata in your destination page, the interstitial page will likely cause these to no longer show up where the initial link is displayed. For this reason, we advise transitioning these links as soon as possible.
Note: In the event the interstitial page is disrupting your use cases, you can suppress it by adding the query param “si=1” to existing goo.gl links.”
Billions of redirects to vanish. According to Majestic, a third-party link tracking tool, billions of Google shortener URLs are still on the web, linked to in content, and those will stop working. “It’s ok, there’s only 3.6 billion http://goo.gl links that Majestic has picked up. And 36 billion historically. August 25 will be very interesting,” Glenn Gabe wrote on X.
He shared this report from the tool:
Why we care. It would probably be a big undertaking to go through all those linking to you with these goo.gl redirects but if you have time, you may want to ask those who are linking to you with that service to update those URLs to link directly to the source.
Either way, we have about a year until these URL redirects completely stop working.