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.