Google takes a further step in its silent war against bots (and what this means for your SEO)

Relatively quietly, Google has rolled out one of those seemingly small changes that can still have a major impact across the global SEO ecosystem.

As various SEO specialists have observed over the past few hours, Google has begun massively expanding [google.com/goto](https://google.com/goto) redirects, a change in the structure of its results that has caught the digital marketing sector off guard and deals a blow to all websites and tools dedicated to scraping those results.

In other words, most of the SEO tools we all know and use.

Google spokespersons have confirmed the news, and have limited themselves to explaining that “We have a long track record of implementing technical measures against constantly evolving forms of abuse, and we periodically take action to protect our services and users.”

What does this change involve?

Until now, when you searched for something on Google, the destination URL appeared directly in the page’s code. For example, if you search for “what is hacoo” you will see something like this:

If you hover over our result, now you see something like this:

And this is what will change.

From now on, Google will hide the actual web address behind an encoded intermediary link, beginning with something like https://google.com/goto and followed by a string of code that only Google can translate.

For the automated systems used by many SEO tools, this changes the landscape: they will no longer always be able to determine directly from the link which final URL occupies each position. If they cannot resolve it by other means, they will have to follow Google’s redirect to discover the destination.

This could multiply the technical cost for scrapers.

Google has not explained the reason for this change, but it seems likely that the company is seeking to make the mass extraction of data more difficult for unauthorised analytics tools and AI engines that crawl its results to train their models and therefore consume a significant amount of the search engine’s resources.

So, what consequences could this have?

It is still too early to know what the final impact will be, but the change could affect tools that automatically monitor rankings on Google. By making it more difficult to extract result URLs directly, these platforms may need more resources or have to make changes to their tracking systems. For some time, the information they provide may be somewhat different or difficult to compare.

For webmasters, however, there is no reason to necessarily expect a direct change in Google Search Console or Google Analytics metrics. These platforms receive their data from Google’s own systems and from actual visits to websites, so the fact that an SEO tool has more difficulty scraping the results does not, in itself, mean that the number of recorded impressions or clicks will decline.

Unless they stop carrying out that scraping work, of course.

In any case, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time Google has caused problems for these companies, as happened when Google removed the usefulness of the &num=100 parameter. This shortcut was extremely useful for some of the leading SEO tools on the market, as it allowed them to track the rankings of thousands of keywords quickly and efficiently by displaying the top 100 results for each of them in a single request.

By removing this shortcut, Google forced these tools to return to the traditional method: requesting 10 pages of 10 results to obtain the same information. In that case, there were consequences for website owners, who saw a drop in the number of impressions recorded in Search Console: the automated queries made by these tools stopped generating the same volume of results and, with it, some of the impressions that Google had previously recorded.

Image: ChatGPT