Google's result-link redirects: what to check in rank-tracking data

Google’s August 2026 confirmation of result-link redirects matters to agencies that buy rank-tracking data. Before drawing conclusions from a changed chart, check whether the supplier is still resolving destination URLs and collecting the expected results.

How the link changes

A redirect is a stop-over. Instead of a link taking your browser directly to example.com/shoes, it takes you to some other address first, and that address immediately replies “not here, go to example.com/shoes”. Your browser follows. You usually notice nothing except a flicker in the address bar.

Redirects are ordinary plumbing. Link shorteners and email click-tracking systems commonly use the same mechanism.

What is new is where Google has put one: on the organic results themselves, the ten links that have historically pointed straight at the destination.

What Google actually said

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land asked Google about it and got a statement back: “We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.”

That is a confirmation, not an explanation. Google did not spell out which abuse, and it did not publish anything in its documentation.

On scale, the useful number comes from Derek Perkins, who runs the rank-tracking company Nozzle. He reported seeing the change at “nearly a 100% rollout across several residential ip providers” — meaning it showed up on ordinary consumer internet connections in several places, not just in a small test.

Search Engine Roundtable had spotted the format in testing earlier in the summer, so this has been coming for a couple of months.

Why data suppliers need to adapt

Many rank-tracking tools collect search results automatically. When a tool tells you a client sits at position 6 for “emergency plumber leeds”, a machine typed that query into Google, from a specific location, and read the page that came back. That reading step is called scraping. Some tools do it themselves; many buy the data wholesale from a supplier.

A scraper reads the HTML of the results page and pulls out the links. When those links were plain URLs, the destination was sitting there in the markup, free to take.

Now the markup holds an encoded string pointing at google.com/goto, and suppliers may need to change how they resolve destinations. The cost depends on their implementation; the reporting does not establish one extra request for every result in every tool.

This sits alongside the legal route Google is already taking. It sued SerpApi, one of the larger wholesalers of search-results data, and refiled a narrower version of that case in August. We wrote about what that lawsuit means for the tools your reports run on. Now there’s a technical squeeze arriving at the same time as the legal one.

What breaks, and what doesn’t

Be careful here, because there is more speculation flying around than measurement.

What Search Engine Land reported: regular searchers are barely affected, apart from losing the preview of the real URL in the status bar when hovering a link. Search Console provides Google’s own performance records and remains a useful comparison. It measures something different from a tracker’s scheduled query sample.

Third-party rank trackers are the ones with a problem, and how much of one depends on how their supplier is built. Some will absorb it quietly. Others will get slower, more expensive, or patchier, and you may see that as gaps in a report rather than as an announcement from the vendor.

Analytics attribution is the open question. Because the hop happens on google.com, the referring domain your analytics sees should still be Google — but nobody has published measurements on how this behaves across browsers and privacy settings yet, so treat confident claims either way as guesses for now.

If your organic numbers move oddly over the next few weeks, this is worth ruling in or out before you go looking for an algorithm update.

What to do

Check your rank-tracking data for holes. Not the trend line, the raw rows: missing dates, keywords that silently stopped reporting, positions that froze. A degraded scraper often looks like stability rather than an error.

Then ask your vendor directly whether they source their own results or buy them, and what their plan is. It’s a fair question now, and the answer tells you how exposed your reporting is.

Compare the tracker with Search Console, allowing for their different scopes. Search Console reflects impressions from real searches; a tracker records selected queries, locations and times.