Google is shutting off URL shortener goo.gl to new users next month and will shut it down for all users next year; existing links will continue to redirect
Google Devs / Google Developers Blog :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the opening move in a seven-year arc: Google's 2018 wind-down of goo.gl ends new link creation but promises existing redirects live on. That promise erodes over time — by 2024 Google warns that goo.gl links will stop working after August 25, 2025, and in 2025 it partially walks that back by agreeing to preserve actively used URLs.
The shutdown fits a recognizable Google cadence visible across the related coverage: PageSpeed in 2015, the Android Reply tool months after this announcement, and Google Bookmarks in 2021 — consumer utilities retired once they no longer serve a strategic product line.
First-order effects
- New users lose access to goo.gl within a month, forcing anyone creating short links to move to another service immediately.
- Existing goo.gl links keep redirecting for now, so sites and documents already using them see no immediate breakage — only a future deadline.
Second-order effects
- Every publisher, app, and document that embedded goo.gl links inherits a migration liability that compounds until the 2025 cutoff, when un-migrated links break at scale.
- Third-party URL shorteners gain a forced influx of migrating users, since Google's exit removes the default option for casual link-shortening needs.
Third-order effects
- Google's eventual concession on actively used URLs shows that mass link rot creates enough user harm to force carve-outs even from a company committed to shutting a service down — establishing deprecation-with-survivors as the realistic end state for web infrastructure.
- If the pattern holds, widely embedded Google endpoints get treated as shared web infrastructure rather than products, raising the cost of retiring them and pushing users toward services with explicit longevity commitments.
The trend: Google's consumer-service shutdown cadence is colliding with the web's dependence on old links, turning simple product retirements into years-long infrastructure migrations with partial reversals.