google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

Search-data provider Autom reports that by late August 2026 nearly all result links in logged-out and private Google searches pointed to opaque google.com/goto redirect addresses rather than the destination page. Its account explains the consequence for software collecting results: reading a result's link target no longer yields the destination, and the address cannot be decoded offline.

Autom says its service instead requests the redirect address without following it and reads the destination from the response's Location header. That adds a network request per result where extracting the page's links previously sufficed. Autom attributes the change to Google's effort against automated result harvesting and says it may still be an experiment; the article quotes no purpose from Google.