Google's URL shortening service will be shut down completely on August 25, 2025, meaning billions of redirected URLs will no longer work after that date.
The service was first launched in 2009, but in March 2019, Google stopped allowing new redirects using the service.
“Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will begin displaying an interstitial page as part of the existing link to inform users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25, 2025, before proceeding to the original target page,” Google wrote.
What it looks like. After August 23, 2024, users who click on the redirected URL will see the following notification/interstitial:
On August 25, 2025, the notification will disappear and the URL will stop working completely and will start showing a 404 not found error.
Click here for details. Google provided the following details about the service shutdown:
“Over time, the percentage of links that will display an interstitial page will increase until our shutdown date. This interstitial page will help us track and adjust affected links that need to be migrated as part of this change. This interstitial page will display until our shutdown date, after which all links served will return a 404 response.
Please be aware that interstitial pages can interrupt the current flow of your goo.gl links. For example, if you use other 302 redirects, an interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you have embedded social metadata on the destination page, an interstitial page may prevent these from appearing where the initial link would. For this reason, we recommend that you migrate these links as soon as possible.
Note: If interstitial pages are interfering with your use case, you can suppress them by adding the query parameter “si=1” to existing goo.gl links.
Billions of redirects will disappear. According to third-party link tracking tool Majestic, billions of Google-shortened URLs still exist on the web, linking to content, but they will no longer work. “Don't worry, Majestic has only acquired 3.6 billion http://goo.gl links, up from 36 billion in the past. August 25th will be a very interesting day,” Glenn Gabe wrote on X.
He shared a report from the tool:
Why we care. It would probably be a lot of work to go through all the sites that link to you using those goo.gl redirects, but if you have the time, you could use that service to ask the sites you link to to update their URLs to link directly to the source.
Either way, it will take about a year for these URL redirects to stop working completely.
