Google Changes Plans for Shortened Goo.gl Links ⇥ blog.google

Google in July last year:

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.

Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on – in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.

As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.

Google last week:

While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links.

We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

This sounds like a big change, but it is a very small one — according to Google’s statistics, the ongoing support affects less than 1% of all shortened links. If you used Google’s URL shortener and have not actively been looking for goo.gl links since last year’s announcement, your links are probably going to stop working this month, and you might not know where they redirect.

Also, even though Google says it is “discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs”, this is not true either. Google continues to use that domain for shared links created from its own apps like Maps and Photos. It says in its post from last year those links will continue to work. I think this is the original sin of this URL shortener and why the company is reluctant to keep supporting it. Google should never have used the same domain for trusted links it created and untrusted URLs from users. This is a problem that can be solved by, say, an interstitial notice of where the short URL is redirecting, but I think Google just wants to wash its hands of the whole thing regardless of the impact it will have.