Google starts rolling out the google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies
This seems like a way for Google to help prevent scraping of its search results by third-party tools and AI companies …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been steadily changing Search from a plain list of exposed URLs into a more mediated interface: mobile snippets replaced displayed URLs with site names and breadcrumbs in 2015, while AI Overviews began linking some terms back into Google Search result pages in 2025.
The new redirect layer follows July 2026's Web Guide experiment, which reorganized results around query aspects. Together, those changes give Google more control over both how results are presented and how automated systems access them.
First-order effects
- Google inserts a Google-controlled hop between its results pages and destination sites, complicating scraping methods that depend on extracting direct outbound URLs.
- Third-party SEO tools, rank trackers, and AI companies gathering Search data must adapt their parsers and request flows to handle the passthrough URLs.
Second-order effects
- Rank-tracking providers face a higher operational burden where their collection systems require more requests or redirect resolution per query, making Google’s results less straightforward to treat as a reusable data feed.
- Google gains a technical enforcement point over automated result extraction while keeping user-facing links functional, shifting access costs toward the tools that rely on SERP-scale collection.
Third-order effects
- If Google retains this architecture, Search results increasingly become a managed access surface rather than a page whose outbound-link structure can be freely repurposed by agents and data collectors.
- The pattern strengthens Google’s position as an agent-distribution gatekeeper: AI products seeking Search-derived signals may need to operate within interfaces and constraints Google controls.
The trend: Search platforms are hardening result pages against automated extraction as AI tools turn SERP data into an input for competing products.