Google has announced that it will no longer support URLs generated with its goo.gl shortener starting from August 25, 2025. This decision, originally announced in 2018, means that these URLs will stop working completely, returning a 404 error. The creation of new goo.gl links, as well as their analysis and management, ended in March 2019.
To prepare users for this change, Google will start displaying, starting from August 23, 2024, an interstitial page with the message “this link will stop working in the near future” every time someone clicks on a goo.gl link. Users will be able to proceed by clicking “Continue” and selecting “Don’t show this again”.
However, Google warns that this interstitial page may cause interruptions in the current flow of redirects for developers: “For example, if you are using other 302 redirects, the interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you have embedded social metadata on your landing page, the interstitial page is likely to cause them to no longer appear where the initial link is displayed. For this reason, we recommend that you change these links as soon as possible.”
To mitigate these issues, Google suggests developers add the query parameter “si=1” to existing goo.gl links to suppress the interstitial page. In 2018, Google recommended developers to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links, a service that detects the user’s platform and directs them to the website or an app, although they eventually closed this service as well.
