Google Is Removing Most of Its Short Links
URL shorteners have been an easy way to share long links online for years. Instead of typing an unsightly and seemingly endless web address, you can run it through a shortener and get a neat, tidy, short URL.
Over the years, a variety of different services have emerged to solve this problem, from TinyURL to Bitly to Short.io. But one legacy link shortening service that has been out of service for some time was developed by Google itself. Goo.gl launched in 2009 and ran for a decade before Google shut it down in 2019. While you could no longer use goo.gl to shorten links, existing shortened URLs continued to work just fine. That was good news for both the websites that had linked to goo.gl for years and the readers who consumed that content.
However, in July 2024, Google put us all on notice when it announced plans to shut down all goo.gl links. The following month, the company began attaching a note to goo.gl URLs. When you click on one of these links, you’ll see a warning that all goo.gl links will stop working after August 25, 2025, unless Google detects “recent activity” on that link. The reason for the change was simple: the company determined that more than 99% of existing short links were inactive between June and July 2024, indicating a need to shut down the service entirely.
This remained the official version for over a year. Google put the onus on developers to change their goo.gl links or they would be permanently removed. However, it seems Google received enough negative feedback about the decision to retire goo.gl that on August 1 of this year, it added a new update to its original announcement confirming that not all goo.gl links would be deactivated. Just most of them.
Which goo.gl links will be deprecated?
According to Google, after August 25, 2025, only short links that were considered inactive at the end of 2024 will be retired. This means that all links to which Google added a redirect notice (i.e. the “99%” that received a notice that these links would be deactivated) will still be inaccessible until the end of this month. All other goo.gl links have been given a reprieve.
If you run a website, this is unfortunate. On the one hand, all goo.gl links active at the end of 2024 are safe. That could be a big deal for anyone who was constantly using those short links from 2009 to 2019. But it also means that the August 25 deadline is still in effect, albeit for some links. You won’t have to rush to replace every goo.gl link, but you will need to confirm which links Google considers stale — a daunting task in itself.
This work to harden your web infrastructure will be appreciated by those of us who click on these links in articles all over the web. Broken links are a real problem on the web , where we once thought that everything we published would live forever. Hopefully, websites can get rid of as many stale short links as possible before the August 25 deadline. However, I suspect that many links that are soon to be broken will never be fixed, either because hosting providers fail to update them in time or because the sites are largely abandoned.