Starting on August 23rd of this year, when someone clicks on a goo.gl link, they will first be directed to a page with a warning that the link will stop working in the near future, and then to the website they wanted to visit. Google shut down its goo.gl URL shortening service in 2018 and prevented users from creating new links. Now, the company Announced We will completely stop supporting existing goo.gl links. By August 25, 2025, the URLs will return a “404 Page Not Found” result.
By displaying the aforementioned warning page to visitors for the next year, Google is giving developers ample time to transition to other shortened URLs. At first, it will only appear on a portion of existing links, but that percentage will continue to grow and will appear on most or all goo.gl links by the end date. The company warns that this intermediate warning page may cause confusion and prevent users from accessing the URLs they actually want to reach, so it advises developers to change their shortened links as soon as possible.
The goo.gl link shortener will join a long list of older features and services in Google’s ever-growing product graveyard, including the Hangouts chat app, the Stadia cloud gaming service and Google+, which once tried to take on Facebook.
