Google hides search result URLs behind an opaque goto redirect
Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results
Google Search now rewrites organic result links to google.com/goto?url=..., an opaque, non-base64 blob that can't be decoded offline; the real destination only appears in the Location header. The change, consistent for logged-out and private sessions since late August 2026, forces scrapers to make an extra request per result, raising the cost of bulk SERP harvesting. Autom.dev has updated its pipeline to resolve goto links and return final URLs in existing API fields.
With plaintext links, a scraper could parse thousands of URLs from HTML without touching Google again. With goto, each result needs a request back to Google just to learn the destination.