If you have ever hovered over a Google search result to see where it goes before clicking, you may have noticed something odd. The little preview at the bottom of your browser does not say the website's name anymore. It says google.com/goto followed by a string of gibberish.
That is not a glitch and it is not a virus. It is a deliberate change Google confirmed in late August 2026.
The short version: your website is fine, your rankings are probably fine, and the reporting tools we all use are catching up. But you may see something strange in your next rankings report, so I would rather explain it now than have you wonder later.
What changed
Until recently, when Google showed you a search result, the link pointed straight at the destination. Search for "plumber in Bellingham" and the link under the third result pointed at that plumber's actual website.
Now, for anyone browsing Google while logged out of their Google account, that link points at a Google address instead. Click it and you still land exactly where you expected. Google just routes you through its own doorway on the way.
The code in that address is different every single time. Run the same search twice and the same result carries a different string. There is no way to decode it without actually following it.
Google's public comment was brief. A spokesperson said the company has a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse.
Why Google is doing this
Read between the lines and the target is not hard to guess: AI companies and data scrapers pulling Google's results at enormous scale to feed their own products.
This is the same campaign that produced the num=100 removal that broke your year-over-year Search Console data. The timing is also notable, landing shortly after a federal court granted SerpApi's motion to dismiss key claims in Google's scraping lawsuit against them. When the courtroom approach stalls, the engineering approach gets a promotion.
The catch is that the tools you rely on read search results the same way a scraper does. Rank trackers, SEO platforms, competitive research tools. None of them are the intended target. All of them are standing in the blast radius.
Why this messes with rank tracking
A rank tracking tool runs a search and reads the results the way you would: this site is in position one, this one is position two. It identifies each site by reading the link.
With those links masked, a tool that has not been updated reads google.com as the site sitting in every position. Your site vanishes from the report. Not because it lost rankings, but because the tool can no longer tell it is there.
The fix sounds simple. Follow each redirect and see where it lands. In practice that is expensive. One industry estimate put it at 500 to 1,000 additional requests to resolve the links for a single five-page ranking check. Multiply that across every keyword, every client, every day, and the cost of collecting ranking data climbs sharply. It also gives Google far more chances to notice something automated is knocking, because every redirect is a checkpoint where a CAPTCHA can appear.
Disruptive, not catastrophic
I want to be careful not to oversell the drama here, because plenty of people online are.
Nothing about your actual website changed. Your pages rank where they ranked. Real visitors reach you normally. They click, they land on your site, they read your page. Analytics still records the visit. Your contact form still works. Anything that genuinely visits a page is unaffected.
What is affected is the layer of tools that read search results from the outside without clicking through:
- Rank tracking reports may show gaps or odd numbers for a stretch
- Competitive research and backlink tools may return incomplete data
- Some AI-driven workflows that read search results need updating
Several tool providers moved quickly, and some had been seeing these redirects intermittently for months and were already prepared.
I also expect this to expand. Right now it applies to logged-out searches. Logged-in users are the obvious next step.
What I am doing about it
Nothing you need to action, but so you know where I stand.
I am watching the reporting tools. If a ranking report suddenly shows google.com where your domain should be, that is this change, not a ranking collapse.
I am expecting some wobble. For the next few weeks ranking numbers may be noisier than usual while tools adapt. If your report looks strange, ask me. That is what I am here for.
The bigger point
Rankings are a directional signal. They tell us whether the work is pointed the right way. They have never been the scoreboard.
The questions that decide whether your SEO investment is working are simpler. Are more of the right people finding you? Are you getting more calls, more form submissions, more booked jobs from organic search? Those numbers come from Analytics and from your own phone, and none of this touches them.
A change in how a link is formatted is not a change in whether customers can find your business.
Questions about how this affects your site? I am in the Sycamore Building in Fairhaven and I answer my email. Get in touch.
