Google’s shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

Links created with Google’s URL shortener will return a 404 error starting August 25th.

by Emma Roth

Jul 24, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Google will officially deprecate links generated with its URL shortening tool next month. On August 25th, 2025, all links in the “https://goo.gl/*” format will no longer work and return a 404 error message.

Google shut down its URL shortener in 2019, citing “changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet.” Links created with the tool continued to work since then, but Google announced last year that it would begin deprecating them as traffic to the shortened URLs declined. “In fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month,” Google said in its July 2024 blog post.

At the time, Google also began displaying a warning page when users click on a shortened URL, saying “this link will no longer work in the near future.” With the shutdown of “goo.gl” links just a month away, now would be a good time to transition your URLs to another shortener if you haven’t already.

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