Starting August 23 of this year, when someone clicks on a goo.gl link, they may first be taken to a page with a warning saying that the link “will no longer work in the near future” before directing them to the website they want to visit. Google shut down its goo.gl URL shortening service in 2018 and banned users from creating new links. Now, the company has Announced which will stop supporting all existing goo.gl links entirely: URLs will return a “404 page not found” result on August 25, 2025.
Google is giving developers enough time to switch to other shorteners by displaying the aforementioned warning page to visitors over the next year. At first, it will only appear for a percentage of existing links, but that percentage will continue to grow until it appears for most, if not all, goo.gl links before the shutdown date. The company warns that interstitial warning pages could cause disruptions and prevent users from accessing the URL they actually want to go to, so it recommends developers change their shortened links as soon as possible.
The goo.gl link-shortening service joins a host of legacy features and services in Google’s growing product graveyard. These include the Hangouts chat app, the Stadia cloud gaming service and Google+, which once tried to compete with facebook.