TL;DR
- Google confirmed to Search Engine Roundtable on 26 August 2026 that it is rolling out google.com/goto passthrough URLs in search results, replacing the direct link with a server-side redirect.
- Barry Schwartz reports the behaviour began as a test in July 2026. Derek Perkins of Nozzle says he sees it at nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.
- Google's only statement was general: a long history of technical measures against evolving forms of abuse. Google did not name scrapers, rank trackers or AI companies.
- Perkins says the goto links cannot be decoded, so tools must follow each redirect, which is costly when a results page carries hundreds of links.
- Searchers are unaffected and land on the same page. The source says nothing about referrer data, analytics attribution or a rollout completion date.
Google has confirmed it is rolling out google.com/goto passthrough URLs in its search results, which means the link behind a result now points at a Google redirect rather than straight at the destination page. Search Engine Roundtable reported the confirmation on 26 August 2026, with Barry Schwartz writing that the behaviour began as a test in July 2026. For anyone who reads a search results page by hand, nothing changes. For anything that reads search results at scale, the address it needs is no longer sitting in the page.
What changed in the results page
A search result has traditionally carried the destination address in the link itself. Hover over the headline and the browser status bar shows the publisher's URL, because that URL is what the anchor points to. Schwartz reports that hovering over a result now shows a google.com/goto URL instead, and that clicking it sends the browser to Google first, which then redirects to the destination.
The redirect is server-side, which is the detail that carries the consequence. A client-side link exposes the destination in the HTML of the page, so any program that fetches the page can read every destination without visiting any of them. A server-side redirect does not. Derek Perkins of Nozzle told Schwartz on X that the goto links cannot be decoded, so providers have to follow the redirect to learn where it goes. He added that following redirects works in small-scale tests, and that Google seems likely to make it difficult at volume, since each results page carries hundreds of links to decode.
That arithmetic is the whole story for tooling. One request used to return a full page of destinations. Now one request returns a page of opaque redirect links, and learning what they point to means issuing a request per link. The cost of reading a results page goes from one fetch to potentially many.
What Google said, and what Google did not say
A Google spokesperson confirmed the rollout to Search Engine Roundtable with a single statement: "We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users."
Read that carefully, because the gap between the statement and the interpretation around it is wide. Google confirmed that the change is rolling out and offered a general position on measures against abuse. Google did not say the change is aimed at scrapers. It did not name rank-tracking tools. It did not name AI companies. It did not define what forms of abuse it has in mind here, and it did not say anything about what, if anything, the passthrough records.
The reading that this targets scraping is Schwartz's and Perkins's, not Google's. Schwartz wrote that it seems like a way for Google to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies, and Perkins described it as an anti-bot measure that eliminates client-side links in favour of server-side redirects. Both are informed readings from people who work with search results daily. Neither is a statement of intent from Google, and the difference matters when you are deciding what to tell a client.
One more piece of care is worth taking with the vocabulary. Search Engine Roundtable's headline calls these tracking parameters, while the body of the report describes a passthrough URL and a server-side redirect. The report does not say what is tracked, or whether anything additional is recorded that was not recorded before.
How far the rollout has gone
The scale of it comes from measurement rather than from Google. Here is what each party actually said, and who said it.
| Claim | Who said it |
|---|---|
| The goto passthrough URL began as a test in July 2026 | Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable |
| The change is rolling out, alongside a general statement on measures against abuse | A Google spokesperson |
| Seen at nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers | Derek Perkins, Nozzle |
| The goto links cannot be decoded, so providers have to follow the redirects | Derek Perkins, Nozzle |
| Each results page carries hundreds of links to decode, so following redirects is hard at scale | Derek Perkins, Nozzle |
Perkins shared a chart of the share of goto-only results pages that Nozzle fetched over roughly four months of the test. Schwartz dates the start of testing to July 2026, so the chart's window and that start date do not line up exactly in the report, and the source does not reconcile them. Schwartz also wrote that he was seeing the redirects in several browsers he was testing.
Who this affects and who it does not
Ordinary searchers are not affected in any way they will notice. A click still lands on the same page it always did, one HTTP hop later. There is no new interstitial, no warning screen and no change to which results appear.
The parties affected are the ones that read results pages programmatically: rank-tracking platforms, scrapers, SERP APIs, competitive-intelligence tools, and any in-house script that parses results to extract URLs. For all of them, a page of destinations has become a page of redirects, and the work of resolving those redirects sits on top of every measurement they were already taking.
If your team buys rank data, the effect reaches you indirectly and with a delay. Whatever this costs the providers in requests, latency and blocked traffic will show up eventually as slower refreshes, thinner keyword coverage, higher prices, or some mix of the three. None of that is stated in the source. It is the ordinary consequence of a data pipeline getting more expensive per unit, and it is worth planning around rather than reacting to.
What an SEO team should actually do
Very little urgently, and one thing structurally. Nothing about your site needs changing. This is a change to how Google links out from its own results, not a change to crawling, indexing, ranking or any signal your pages send.
The structural point is about which numbers you treat as the record. Third-party rank data is a modelled view of search results, gathered by fetching them, and it just got harder to gather. Search Console is a first-party report of your own impressions, clicks and average position, delivered by Google directly, and nothing in this report suggests it is affected. Teams doing serious SEO work in Thailand and elsewhere have been drifting toward first-party data as the primary record for years, and this is one more nudge in that direction rather than a new argument.
Practically, that means three habits worth having in place before any provider disruption arrives: know which of your reports depend on a third-party rank tracker, keep an exported history of that data so a gap in coverage does not erase the trend, and make sure the Search Console and analytics side of your reporting can carry the story on its own if rank data thins out for a period. Teams reviewing their measurement stack, including their GA4 setup, are in a good position to check that dependency now rather than during an incident.
The open questions the source does not answer
There are several, and it is better to name them than to guess at them. Search Engine Roundtable does not give a completion date for the rollout, and does not say whether it reaches every country, language or search surface. It does not say whether the passthrough applies to every result type or only to some. It does not say whether Google intends this specifically as an anti-scraping measure, because Google did not say so.
The question people will ask first is whether this changes referrer data, analytics attribution or organic traffic reporting. The source does not address that at all. It reports a passthrough redirect in the results page and a confirmation of rollout, and it says nothing about referrer headers or about what a destination site sees when a visitor arrives. Treat that as an open question rather than as a risk to announce, and answer it from your own analytics when there is something to observe.
What this means for Thai marketers
This section is Relevant Audience's reasoning, not a claim from the source. Search Engine Roundtable does not mention Thailand and names no market at all. Perkins's measurement is described as covering several residential ip providers without saying which ones or where they are, so there is no basis in the report for saying whether Thai results pages are affected at the same rate as any other market.
What can be said is which teams here would feel it first. Agencies and in-house teams in Thailand that report weekly ranking movements from a third-party tool, and anyone tracking Thai-language keyword sets where coverage is already thinner than for English, are the ones whose data quality depends on providers absorbing this cost. If refresh rates slow or coverage narrows on Thai keyword sets, the change described here is one plausible reason to ask a provider about. Confirming it means asking the provider, not inferring it from a report that never mentions the market.
FAQ: Google's goto passthrough URLs
Does this affect my website's traffic or rankings?
No, nothing in the report indicates a change to crawling, indexing or ranking. The change is to the link Google puts in its own results page, which now points at a google.com/goto redirect before sending the visitor to the same destination.
Did Google say this is aimed at scrapers and AI companies?
No, Google did not say that. A Google spokesperson confirmed the rollout and gave a general statement about deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, while the scraping interpretation comes from Barry Schwartz and from Derek Perkins of Nozzle, not from Google.
Will my rank tracking stop working?
The source does not say, and no provider outage is reported. Perkins's point is that the goto links cannot be decoded, so tools must follow each redirect, and that this becomes hard at scale when a single results page carries hundreds of links, which is a cost issue for providers rather than a stated failure.
Does this change referrer data or Google Analytics reporting?
The source does not answer that question. Search Engine Roundtable reports the passthrough redirect and Google's confirmation, and it says nothing about referrer headers, analytics attribution or organic traffic reporting, so there is nothing to conclude from it either way.
When did this start and is the rollout finished?
Schwartz reports that it began as a test in July 2026 and that Google confirmed the rollout on 26 August 2026, with no completion date given. Derek Perkins of Nozzle said he sees it at nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers.
