Google recently expanded the use of google.com/goto redirect URLs across Google Search results. Instead of linking directly to the destination page, affected results first pointed to a Google-owned URL that redirected the user to the final website.

This change briefly affected some URLs returned by SerpApi. Our engineering team identified the new behavior, developed a fix, and deployed it across the affected Google Search result types. SerpApi is now returning direct destination URLs again.

Although the change did not affect visible result titles, snippets, rankings, or other parsed data, it made the link field less useful for workflows that depend on direct destination URLs. Businesses using search data to identify ranking pages or monitor their SEO performance could no longer reliably access or compare the actual URLs appearing in search results.

Potentially affected workflows included:

• Rank tracking and SEO analysis
• Citation and source extraction
• AI agents and RAG pipelines
• Link analysis and content discovery
• Applications that store or compare destination URLs

For web scraping providers, the change required updates to how Google result links were decoded and normalized. Because the destination URL could be encoded differently depending on the result type, a single parsing method could not resolve every variation.

Search engines are constantly evolving, and changes like this are one reason teams use SerpApi instead of maintaining their own Google Search parsers. We handle these changes behind the scenes to keep API responses stable, structured, and ready to use.

Try SerpApi today for free!