Google will discontinue its goo.gl shortener links next year.
As of August 23, users clicking on a goo.gl link may encounter a warning message stating that the link will soon be inactive before being redirected to their intended website. Google discontinued its goo.gl URL shortening service in 2018, preventing users from generating new links. The company has now revealed that all existing goo.gl links will cease to be supported, resulting in a “404 page not found” error by August 25, 2025.
Google is giving developers plenty of time to switch to other mitigations by displaying the aforementioned warning page to visitors over the next year. It will initially only appear on a certain percentage of existing links, but that percentage will continue to grow until it appears on most, if not all, goo.gl links by the time they close. The company warns that interim warning pages can be disruptive and prevent users from getting to the URL they really want to go to, so it advises developers to replace shortened links as soon as possible.
The Goo.gl link shortening service combines quite a number of old features and services in Google’s ever-growing product graveyard. They include the Hangouts chat app, the Stadia cloud gaming service, and Google+, which once tried to take on Facebook.
