Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results

Google Search is rewriting organic result links to google.com/goto?url=... instead of exposing the destination URL directly in the HTML.

When you click a result, Google redirects you to the real page. The url parameter uses a custom, Google-specific encoding. It is not a plain base64 of the target URL. In practice, it looks like an opaque reference to Google's index record for that page.

As of late August 2026, this is showing up consistently across searches when you are logged out or browsing in private mode. It may still be an experiment, but it is no longer limited to a small slice of SERPs.

Google has used redirect wrappers before. The older format is google.com/url?q=[URL-encoded destination] , where the target link is readable in the query string.