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UPDATE 8/4/25: Google backtracks slightly and now says it will "preserve actively used links."
Original Story:
Goo.gl is going to the Google graveyard.
The tech giant is hitting the kill switch on the Google URL Shortener, meaning all goo.gl links will start displaying a warning message next month and no longer work as of Aug. 25, 2025. Once a web destination in its own right, the goo.gl link now redirects to Google's post detailing the shutdown.
Google is giving developers plenty of time to move their links to new domains, but Google's warning message could lead to "disruptions" and stop goo.gl-connected pages from loading properly. It's possible to disable this warning page, however, by adding the query parameter "si=1" to existing goo.gl links, Google says.
Goo.gl was initially created in response to the rise of Twitter, which had strict character limits until Elon Musk took over and expanded it to 10,000 last year.
"With character limits in tweets, status updates and other modes of short form publishing, a shorter URL leaves more room to say what's on your mind — and that's why people use them," Google said in 2009 when it first launched goo.gl.
Since then, the web and social media landscape has changed dramatically. Links are sometimes suppressed in algorithms, and other link-holding sites like FlowPage and LinkTree have sprung up to offer creators short links that redirect to many more. Google cites this changing web landscape as well as link-shortening competitors as its reasons for killing goo.gl (Bit.ly and TinyURL likely played a part). This move isn't exactly a surprise, though, as Google first said it was diverting resources away from the tool in 2018.
Some marketing and SEO executives see the demise of goo.gl as Google accepting defeat in the link-shortening game, while others view it as an evolution to newer tech.
"Use has been declining in recent years as more advanced link management tools were established," Javier Casteneda, technical SEO analyst at SEO agency Dark Horse, tells PCMag.
But James Foote, technical director at SEO firm Polaris Agency, warns that this could result in over 280 million dead links if developers don't update their URLs. When goo.gl goes dark, unfixed links that used it will display 404 errors.
"This level of 'link rot,' as it's affectionately known, could create a significant low-value computational cost for Google," Foote tells PCMag. "I would imagine they will be adding more to the engine to disregard these links from crawl/index in the hope that they will be removed from the index and die out."